Life History and the Historical Moment
Erik H. Erikson
Language: English
Pages: 199
ISBN: 0393011038
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This insight, present in all his work beginning with Childhood and Society, and particularly examined in Young Man Luther and Gandhi's Truth, finds full and mature expression in the present book.
Just as Erikson's notion of the identity crisis has been obscured and confused as it has passed into everyday speech, so too have glib popularizers misused his notions of psychobiography and psychohistory. Thus, this book is of supreme importance, not merely to set the record straight, but more especially to make these vital ideas, central to our time, fully available.
"To deal with life history and history psychoanalytically," Erikson points out, "means to engage in a kind of circular chronology: our inquiry always points to selected periods in the past which, in throwing new light on the present, suggest new forays into the more distant past." Consequently, this book opens with autobiography; ranges through discussions of Freud and Gandhi and of the meaning of ideas on womanhood; and concludes with an examination of the role of psychoanalysis in the evolution of ethics.
Malthusianism Mao Tse-tung Marxism youth and Masochism Mboya, Tom Mead, Margaret Mechanism, Freud’s as caricatured by Bullitt in “Project,” Mekeel, Scudder Memory traces Menstruation Metapsychology Meynert, Theodor Migration, identity and Millet, Kate “Millowner” of Ahmedabad Gandhi’s relation to transference in Mitscherlich, Alexander Moksha Morality development of as distinguished from ethics Moral position Moratorium, psychological Mosbacher, Eric Moscow Moses
yet undoubtedly again clearly circumscribed areas. The correspondence thus promises to reveal new aspects of Freud only to the extent to which it challenges the analyst to study correspondence as a medium of communication and to understand intellectual friendship as a traditional and highly important form of sublimated homoeroticism. The letters present us with a truer or clearer picture of Freud only to the extent to which we are able to recognize in them a correspondence personality of an
“getting there first” combine in the remark: “I picked up a recent book by Janet . . . with beating heart, and laid it down again with my pulse returned to normal. He has no suspicion of the clue.” This urgent theme of time first overlaps with and then is gradually replaced by a geographic restlessness: would time permit becoming a general practitioner, maybe in Berlin, in England, in America? And toward the end of the correspondence a strangely intense, a “deeply neurotic” urge to see Rome. At
of psychology against mankind’s unconquerable resistance, again becomes clear one month later. For he suddenly reports that he has recognized his patients’ universal tendency to prolong the treatment and the dependence on the analyst as “an inherent feature and . . . connected with the transference . . . such prolongation is a compromise between illness and health which patients themselves desire, and . . . the physician must therefore not lend himself to it.” It is clear that he has now
apocalyptic end before anything could live, one should remember that they had grown up in a setting in which adult happiness-as-usual did not exclude the minute-by-minute potential of a nuclear holocaust—and an end of mankind as we know it. The cognitive facts established by Piaget make it plausible enough that youth tends to think ideologically—that is, with a combination of an egocentric, narcissistic orientation determined to adapt the world to itself and a devotion to idealistic and