Volume 34, Number 19 · December 3, 1987
The Artist as Analyst
By Jerome S. Bruner
A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers From 1930 to 1980
by Erik H. Erikson, edited by Stephen Schlein Ph.D.
Norton, 782 pp., $29.95
Erik Erikson must surely be the most distinguished living psychoanalyst. His early work in child therapy, his ventures into psychoanalytic anthropology, his rendering of the 'identity crisis' and of the 'stages' in the human life cycle, all these established him as a brilliant, though aberrant, psychoanalytic theorist, aberrant particularly in his sensitivity to the ways modern culture has shaped the neuroses of contemporary life. Then came his prize-winning biographies of the young Luther and of the aging Gandhi, which catapulted him beyond the starchy circle of Freudian psychoanalysts and brought his work to the attention of historians and literary people. Younger historians began to find Erikson's form of 'psychohistory' attractive. And social critics found his psychological rendering of the Marxist idea of alienation—the famous 'identity crisis'—a less pessimistic way of thinking about dropouts and delinquents.
Review, 4588 words
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