Volume 46, Number 11 · June 24, 1999
The Enigma of Erik Erikson
By Howard Gardner
Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson
by Lawrence J. Friedman
Scribner, 592 pp., $35.00
Like the major topics that he addressed, the psychoanalyst Erik Homburger Erikson came into his own in the America of the 1960s. From his newly created position as professor of human development at Harvard, Erikson claimed that there were major psychological differences between men and women, a view that was taken as a challenge and a provocation by the nascent women's movement. Decades-long studies of troubled youth in several countries culminated in his concepts of 'identity' and the 'identity crisis,' notions that rapidly entered into the popular culture and took on special meaning for college students, hippies, draft resisters, and aging members of the 'beat' generation. Incorporated in his much-praised study of Mahatma Gandhi, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Erikson's notions of identity came to be applied as well to the emerging nations of Africa and Asia.
Review, 6884 words
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