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Margaret Brenman-Gibson has given us a beautiful and loving paper with Erikson's unfortunate marginalization as its central focus. Morris Eagle has looked at the broad clinical implications of two of Erikson's most sweeping contributions: the interaction of individual and society, and the relative autonomy of the several developmental phases. Irving Steingart has concentrated on Erikson's particular and subtle influence on clinical thinking, and on the relevance of his thinking to some of the most current psychoanalytic controversies.
Erikson's marginalization, Brenman-Gibson tells us, can be attributed, in good measure, to the disdain intellectuals too often have for so-called popularizers. She is right, and they are more than wrong; for in being wrong they have contributed to the marginalization of psychoanalysis as a profession and as a way of thinking. My own experience as a teacher-educator is that psychoanalytic thinking can effectively be made accessible, and that Erikson's ideas are especially useful toward that end. In teacher training, in fact, Erikson's ideas provide the primary exposure to a psychoanalytic point of view.
To the extent that psychoanalysis, as a treatment, has adopted Leo Stone's widening scope, rather than Anna Freud's narrower one (and that is mainly the case), Eagle's emphasis on Erikson's social point of view is most welcome. Freud was concerned with guarding against a parochialism in psychoanalysis, selecting the gentile Jung as first IPA president to avoid having his discovery seen as a Jewish specialty. We need to maintain a similar guard against psychoanalysis becoming a treatment for well-to-do Americans. We gain as well