Many years have passed since that bright spring afternoon in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, when Erik Homburger Erikson, Robert Knight, David Rapaport, and I were enjoying our weekly “walking discussion” of serious matters. We were walking as we talked because Erik had early on requested that we do so. He loved to walk and to climb mountains. He would always say, “It helps me to think if I can walk while we talk.” The two six-footers, Erik and Bob, strode ahead while the short-legged Rapaport and I did our best to keep up, both with the rapid pace and with the conversation. At times it was hard to hear; but we managed.
There came a moment—as we were passing the old white brick building on Main Street that still houses the Austen Riggs patients—when I had to skip forward in order to hear Erik say, “What we're sorely lacking in this business is some picture”—he frequently thought in visual terms—“of a whole Self, with a capital S. I think Harry Stack Sullivan is on the right track, maybe. Doesn't he say something about a self-system?” At this point Rapaport, the eminent theoretician, interrupted excitedly: “Yes, yes, Erik. That's what I was trying to tell you about the other day. But you know, Erik, Sullivan doesn't really have a feel for how people grow up in different cultures. And anyway, his work so far stops with adolescence.” Erik now fell back a step, with the three of us now abreast, Rapaport to one side of the narrow sidewalk and me in the middle, energized by the excitement of these two extraordinary men who were talking across me.
I waited for that brief moment when both of them needed to draw a breath and said, “Don't you think, Erik, that this idea of a Self, with a capital S, is somehow related to your identity concept?” Rapaport looked surprised (at the temerity, I thought, of my breaking into their exchange at all, something I rarely did in those days) and then said, in his severe teacher-of-the-Talmud manner, “What exactly do you mean, Margaret?” Inasmuch as I did not know exactly what I meant and inasmuch as I felt privileged even to have been invited to participate in this foursome, I remember blushing, falling silent, and feeling humiliated.
But Erik, to my great relief and pleasure, took up my comment, saying, “Yes, I have thought about that a great deal and have even thought of discarding the term ego identity entirely. I am thinking lately that the term self-identity might convey best what I have in mind. In fact, I have the thought that the whole Self, with a capital S, probably includes several selves. Also, we must think of how a whole Self includes both positive and negative identities.” He continued: “I have lately been exploring the paths to putting all this together, theoretically, with the idea of the ego as an unconscious screening and integrating system. And, beyond all this, there is that vast territory psychoanalytic theory has had no chance to explore, the conscious sense of ‘I-ness.‘ There is much work to be done.”
Erikson's extraordinary essay on this “I-ness,” this conscious-ness, would appear in the Yale Review three decades later . He titled it “The Galileean Sayings and the sense of I,” named not for Galileo but for Jesus of Galilee, using, as “clinical data, Jesus' sayings as quoted in that epic literary work we call the ‘Good Book.‘” Erik's essay, packed with Biblical quotations, is without equal as a portrait of the conscious sense of “I-ness.” In his last years he would struggle, without success, to expand this essay into a biography of Jesus—a full life-cycle narrative that would be a fitting crown to his life-histories (“not case-histories,” he would say) of Luther and Gandhi.
When in his last decade we discussed the “Jesus book,” it seemed to me he was still tackling the formidable job he had begun as we walked on that long-ago spring day. I continued stubbornly to defend his concept of “self-identity,” pointing out that I had been finding it, over the preceding decades, invaluable both in comprehending the interwoven tapestry of human development and in establishing the concept of “mutuality,” as he called it, so essential in work with patients, a concept only recently emerging in the analytic literature. For reasons never quite clear to me, Erik continued to resist the word self in “self-identity.” Yet he kept revisiting it, even putting some of his ruminations into print in a “Theoretical Interlude” in his revised Identity, Youth, and Crisis.
It was not until 1968, seventeen years after Childhood and Society had taken the world by storm in literally dozens of ways, that there appeared for the first time in print a discerning appreciation by a “respectable” psychoanalyst of the quantum leap he had taken beyond Freud.
Nathaniel Ross (father of John Munder Ross), then associate editor of JAPA, wrote, in a review of Identity, Youth, and Crisis: “It seems most unlikely that the prophets who have lately been sounding the doom of psychoanalysis have been reading Erikson. Nor am I at all certain that he is regarded with due consideration in his own camp. If psychoanalysis has, with Hartmann, striven for a comprehensiveness which would fashion it into a truly general psychology, it is high time that the magnificent scope of Erikson's theoretical work took over its inner sanctum. And if the so-called deviant schools, especially the culturalists, took the trouble to read what surely would provide them with the integrated body of principles they so sorely lack, they could do no better than to discover the embarras de richesses that awaits them in the writings of this most seminal of thinkers…. Were we to add to the truly holistic approach of Erikson the exciting leap from the psychosexual to the psychosocial, his profoundly worked out concepts of identity and his Weltanschauung of a universal ethic—a solidly based integration between the newer neurophysiological discoveries and psychoanalytically derived data, we would have no need to mourn the demise of a psychological system which has, after all, contributed more to our knowledge of human nature than anything that has come before or since.” Ross even highlighted in this enlightened account Erikson's still vexed discussion of the concept of self-identity, devoting half a page to it and noting in awed pleasure Erikson's theoretical distinctions regarding the meanings of “I,” “ego,” and “self.” The discussion, he insisted, “would delight the most dedicated metapsychologist.”
Ross then concluded: “Finally, Erikson speaks of the wisdom of those who have already lived a life of mutuality. Again, this leads not simply to an individual life fulfillment; unless we go beyond that goal to the establishment of a universal ethic, all these fine efforts to improve the individual destiny of man will only end in a rain of radiation. What psychologist or psychoanalyst speaks such words? … Perhaps it is the unique measure of Erik Erikson that in his writing both form and content are one—as bespeaks the true artist, who happens also to be a scientist with a mind of luminous quality.”
But Ross's “discovery” of Erikson failed to sell him to the psychoanalytic establishment. He was not so much attacked—as he was in other disciplines,
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Ph.D., is a Senior Staff Member at the Austen Riggs Center; Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, at Harvard Medical School at Cambridge Hospital; and Senior Associate, Manhattan Project II, at International Physicians to Prevent Nuclear War.
where he was beginning to exert considerable influence—as simply marginalized.
I can recall how this marginalization wounded him—almost as much as the personal attack on him by the political theorist Marshall Berman, who in a front-page New York Times Book Review article on Life History and the Historical Moment, accused Erikson—an exceedingly vulnerable man—of denying his Jewishness. Erik wrote a long personal letter to all his friends (and enemies) explaining himself. It didn't seem to help.
One afternoon in the 1970s—as we were discussing again the concept of self-identity, and my use of it in a biography I was writing of the American playwright Clifford Odets—Erik burst forth: “All I hear these days is self psychology.” He then added wistfully: “Well, Margaret, what history will say is that Erikson tried, but Kohut made it.” Now it was my turn to be irritable. I exploded. “Erik, you are nuts. Yes, Kohut has given a sharp, if limited focus to the concept of the self, but he is simply not in the same intellectual arena as you have been, with a large view of how a person's inner world is inevitably expressed in the outer world, over a lifetime and in a particular culture. It's a different ball game entirely.” He appeared unpersuaded.
Recently, something remarkable occurred. At its December 1994 meeting, the American Psychoanalytic Association set aside an entire day for a discussion of Erikson's work, a discussion that panelist Robert Wallerstein said was “disgracefully overdue.” Edward Shapiro's impression from the panel was “that psychoanalysis is continuing to struggle to join Erikson's idea. We have learned that a one-person psychology is inadequate to attend to the data. We are now embedded in the study of the dyad… . Our next step is … to the surrounding culture… . Far from being an idealist, Erik Erikson is a hard-nosed pragmatist, and we need his thinking.”
It is my conviction that Erik was wrong about “what history will say” of him. I—along with many—impatiently await historian Lawrence Friedman's broad and scholarly study of Erikson's life and works. It will be more judicious, I believe, and more wisely balanced than anything so far. Perhaps it will help our profession—and our planet—to survive.