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Identity—Youth and Crisis
BOOK REVIEWS
IDENTITY-YOUTH AND CRISIS.By Erik H.Erikson. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968, 336 pp., $6.95.
Reviewed by E . James Anthony, M.D. There is a story told of Freud (and perhaps apocryphal) where he is asked for a reference regarding an ex-patient and, characteristically, declines to give one because his knowledge of the individual, he says, is only “from the inside.” This is the way, in fact, that an analyst generally does get to know his patient since his knowledge derives from one understandably biased person in a very special situation. Recently, however, there has been a move among therapists toward a more comprehensive way of knowing the individual which involves the self or personal identity. This demanded a knowing “from the outside” as well. It was equally important for the patient to know himself both from the inside and from the outside, as he saw himself and as others saw him. It was this duality of approach to the self that set out to capture the quintessence of the phenomenon of identity. It would be untrue to say that Erikson invented this concept, but he has certainly popularized it and, what is more, put i’t on a clinical footing and within the context of development and relationship. It has caught the public imagination, and today almost every adolescent seems to be engaged in a passionate search for his identity rather like the Holy Grail that becomes more elusive and ineluctable the nearer one gets to it. In its absence, there is chaos and confusion, hopelessness and helplessness. As one teen-ager stated it: “If you haven’t got identity, you’ve got nothing.” What then is this identity? Erikson realizes that it defies definition; that it is “unfathomable,” “all-pervasive,” and that he himself is not too sure that he understands what it means. T h e present Or. Anthony is Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri.
559
560
Book Reviews
book is not intended to offer a “definitive explanation,” but he thinks that by the end of it, he might be able to establish “its indispensability in various contexts” through case history, life history, and history itself. At various times, he insists that psychoanalysis by itself cannot explain the problem of identity. I t is too concerned with knowing the person “from the inside” and it tends to ignore his Urnwelt. “Only psychoanalysis and social science together,’’ he says, “can eventually chart the course of individual life in the setting of a changing community” and, again, that “one methodological precondition for grasping identity would be a psychoanalysis sophisticated enough to include the environment” or “a social psychology which is psychoanalytically sophisticated.” H e explains that “traditional psychoanalytic method cannot quite grasp identity because it has not developed terms to conceptualize the environment,” which is to emphasize, once more, that people must be approached both from the inside and from the outside and that people must approach themselves in similar fashion. T h e curious, but perhaps not surprising thing, is that it is as difficult to define Erikson himself as his concept of identity. When one thinks of him, one is inclined to think of a whole series of shibboleths or “fancy terms,” to use his own self-mocking phrase, such as psychosocial moratorium, psychohistorical perspective, identity confusion, basic trust, pseudospecies, etc., with which he has both enlivened and enlightened the contemporary scene. He comes through, however, in a more nebulous manner. I n some ways, he appears to be the very problem that he poses. What is Erikson or who is he? He has undergone change of name, change of occupation, change of habitation, and has been at various times an artist, a psychoanalyst, a developmental psychologist, an anthropologist, a historian, and a biographer. H e is not too sure of his own role. “I have never learned to feel comfortable in the role of a writer on human development who must publish clinical observations as part-evidence,” and yet, to a large extent, this is what he is and does. He seems to grope his way, although in lucidly delivered prose, toward a better understanding of this fundamental problem; to try it out on people so that he can better understand it himself. “I am apt to present the same observation to different audiences in various contexts hoping each time that understanding may be deepened.” For these reasons, he finds a creative kinship with men as varied as Luther, Gandhi, Shaw, and the incomparable William James who pioneered the whole field of identity, Neither for James, nor for Erikson, was involvement with the subject an academic exercise but a personal experience. For Erikson, the phenomenon was indefinable except in operational terms. For James, the point of
Book Reviews
56 1
departure was the empirical self which was the sum total of all that the individual can call his own-his body, his home, his possessions, his family, his friends, and his ideas. There was an enduring “palpitating inner-life” that allowed each of us to get up in the morning and say: “Here’s the same old self again,” just as he might say: “Here’s the same old bed, the same old room and the same old world.” According to James, the sense of identity stemmed from the consciousness of personal sameness. It started with body feeling and ended with the warmth and glow of the social self. It had a “generic unity” that was built u p over the years from earliest times. It was this central nucleus of the self system that was suffused with self feeling such as warmth, intimacy and continuity. Identity required for its possession an animal heat and a lot of feeling. T o listen to Erikson and James talk about identity is to realize that to understand the concept fully one must have gained and lost and regained this precious sense. James is equally unsure about defining the concept completely. “The truth is that we are here face to face,” he says, “with that final inexplicability.. . the ultimate fact. . . by far the wisest thing we can do is to accept it without any theory of how it takes place.” Erikson takes up a similar position. He is not intending to provide us with a theory or a definition but with a “demonstration.” Much of this demonstration covers familiar ground and we are exposed once again to the eight stages of man (without the familiar and rather puzzling 8 x 8 table with its 64 largely empty cells) as we wind our way through the Eriksonian life cycle following its epigenetic course from basic trust and mistrust to its ultimate in wisdom, disgust, and despair. We have, again, the elegant capsular biographies that seem so explicable now that we are cognizant with the identity crisis. T h e reviewer’s personal grumble (and he recognizes this as ungenerous in the light of the riches that Erikson has showered to his professional betterment) is that the psychosocial system offers less than it promises to the child psychiatrist. His schema does not deal with the effects of fixation and regression and 48 of the cells remain disappointingly empty. There is only a beginning of a descriptive and dynamic psychopathology tied to the crucial concept of identity. Can one hope for completion and closure? Erikson has been a powerful creative force in the field for many years, and it is in the nature of things for creativity to wane. At this point, it is not unusual for creation to give place to construction and for the novel ideas of many decades to be elaborated in as many ways as possible so that their full importance and significance can be realized.
562
Book Reviews
To a certain extent, this is what Erikson is doing in this book, mulling over a concept and its varied possibilities. We must await his completion of the epigenetic table before his work on identity can be said to be done. There is so much in this book of interest and note that the reviewer can hardly do better than direct the reader to it for the best statment of the author’s views. However, I cannot forbear to single out Chapter 7 on “Womanhood and the Inner Space” as one of the most creative pieces of psychological writing in recent years. It brought back the moment in Ibsen’s T h e Doll’s House when Nora walks out of the house, slamming the door behind her, and opening the door to women forever in their new emancipation. Erikson, and others, have pointed to the limitations of looking at women solely within the context of the male phallus. Women are not compounded only of penis envy, masculine protest, and the castration complex. Womanhood cannot be defined only in terms of the genital trauma. Erikson sees women as enveloping their wonderfully productive interiors. They are the house that mankind has built and tended and defended. It would seem to me as important in therapy to analyze the fantasies and feelings connected with the “inner space” as to draw out the hurts associated with the genital “injury.” At the end of my reading of this book, I obtained a global perspective of people everywhere busily cultivating their own identities, inner spaces, and outer territories as a prelude to establishing their own particular “pseudospecies.” There is so much pseudoactivity in the world today and so many territorial imperatives. Of the many disciplines, child psychiatry, because of its focus on development, environment, prevention, dynamics, and organicity, appears to offer the best opportunity to “institute a new field which would have to create its own historical sophistication,” to quote Erikson. It is a field with a not too clear-cut identity at the present time and not too certain of what it is and where it is going. Provided it does not get too bogged down in administration, organization, hierarchical systems, and nit-picking considerations of role and status, it might well escape becoming one of Erikson’s pseudospecies and develop instead into a dynamic, creative, knowledgeseeking community of colleagues. Let us learn from Erikson, from history, and from the dreadful examples that surround us.
IDENTITY-YOUTH AND CRISIS.By Erik H.Erikson. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968, 336 pp., $6.95.
Reviewed by E . James Anthony, M.D. There is a story told of Freud (and perhaps apocryphal) where he is asked for a reference regarding an ex-patient and, characteristically, declines to give one because his knowledge of the individual, he says, is only “from the inside.” This is the way, in fact, that an analyst generally does get to know his patient since his knowledge derives from one understandably biased person in a very special situation. Recently, however, there has been a move among therapists toward a more comprehensive way of knowing the individual which involves the self or personal identity. This demanded a knowing “from the outside” as well. It was equally important for the patient to know himself both from the inside and from the outside, as he saw himself and as others saw him. It was this duality of approach to the self that set out to capture the quintessence of the phenomenon of identity. It would be untrue to say that Erikson invented this concept, but he has certainly popularized it and, what is more, put i’t on a clinical footing and within the context of development and relationship. It has caught the public imagination, and today almost every adolescent seems to be engaged in a passionate search for his identity rather like the Holy Grail that becomes more elusive and ineluctable the nearer one gets to it. In its absence, there is chaos and confusion, hopelessness and helplessness. As one teen-ager stated it: “If you haven’t got identity, you’ve got nothing.” What then is this identity? Erikson realizes that it defies definition; that it is “unfathomable,” “all-pervasive,” and that he himself is not too sure that he understands what it means. T h e present Or. Anthony is Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri.
559
560
Book Reviews
book is not intended to offer a “definitive explanation,” but he thinks that by the end of it, he might be able to establish “its indispensability in various contexts” through case history, life history, and history itself. At various times, he insists that psychoanalysis by itself cannot explain the problem of identity. I t is too concerned with knowing the person “from the inside” and it tends to ignore his Urnwelt. “Only psychoanalysis and social science together,’’ he says, “can eventually chart the course of individual life in the setting of a changing community” and, again, that “one methodological precondition for grasping identity would be a psychoanalysis sophisticated enough to include the environment” or “a social psychology which is psychoanalytically sophisticated.” H e explains that “traditional psychoanalytic method cannot quite grasp identity because it has not developed terms to conceptualize the environment,” which is to emphasize, once more, that people must be approached both from the inside and from the outside and that people must approach themselves in similar fashion. T h e curious, but perhaps not surprising thing, is that it is as difficult to define Erikson himself as his concept of identity. When one thinks of him, one is inclined to think of a whole series of shibboleths or “fancy terms,” to use his own self-mocking phrase, such as psychosocial moratorium, psychohistorical perspective, identity confusion, basic trust, pseudospecies, etc., with which he has both enlivened and enlightened the contemporary scene. He comes through, however, in a more nebulous manner. I n some ways, he appears to be the very problem that he poses. What is Erikson or who is he? He has undergone change of name, change of occupation, change of habitation, and has been at various times an artist, a psychoanalyst, a developmental psychologist, an anthropologist, a historian, and a biographer. H e is not too sure of his own role. “I have never learned to feel comfortable in the role of a writer on human development who must publish clinical observations as part-evidence,” and yet, to a large extent, this is what he is and does. He seems to grope his way, although in lucidly delivered prose, toward a better understanding of this fundamental problem; to try it out on people so that he can better understand it himself. “I am apt to present the same observation to different audiences in various contexts hoping each time that understanding may be deepened.” For these reasons, he finds a creative kinship with men as varied as Luther, Gandhi, Shaw, and the incomparable William James who pioneered the whole field of identity, Neither for James, nor for Erikson, was involvement with the subject an academic exercise but a personal experience. For Erikson, the phenomenon was indefinable except in operational terms. For James, the point of
Book Reviews
56 1
departure was the empirical self which was the sum total of all that the individual can call his own-his body, his home, his possessions, his family, his friends, and his ideas. There was an enduring “palpitating inner-life” that allowed each of us to get up in the morning and say: “Here’s the same old self again,” just as he might say: “Here’s the same old bed, the same old room and the same old world.” According to James, the sense of identity stemmed from the consciousness of personal sameness. It started with body feeling and ended with the warmth and glow of the social self. It had a “generic unity” that was built u p over the years from earliest times. It was this central nucleus of the self system that was suffused with self feeling such as warmth, intimacy and continuity. Identity required for its possession an animal heat and a lot of feeling. T o listen to Erikson and James talk about identity is to realize that to understand the concept fully one must have gained and lost and regained this precious sense. James is equally unsure about defining the concept completely. “The truth is that we are here face to face,” he says, “with that final inexplicability.. . the ultimate fact. . . by far the wisest thing we can do is to accept it without any theory of how it takes place.” Erikson takes up a similar position. He is not intending to provide us with a theory or a definition but with a “demonstration.” Much of this demonstration covers familiar ground and we are exposed once again to the eight stages of man (without the familiar and rather puzzling 8 x 8 table with its 64 largely empty cells) as we wind our way through the Eriksonian life cycle following its epigenetic course from basic trust and mistrust to its ultimate in wisdom, disgust, and despair. We have, again, the elegant capsular biographies that seem so explicable now that we are cognizant with the identity crisis. T h e reviewer’s personal grumble (and he recognizes this as ungenerous in the light of the riches that Erikson has showered to his professional betterment) is that the psychosocial system offers less than it promises to the child psychiatrist. His schema does not deal with the effects of fixation and regression and 48 of the cells remain disappointingly empty. There is only a beginning of a descriptive and dynamic psychopathology tied to the crucial concept of identity. Can one hope for completion and closure? Erikson has been a powerful creative force in the field for many years, and it is in the nature of things for creativity to wane. At this point, it is not unusual for creation to give place to construction and for the novel ideas of many decades to be elaborated in as many ways as possible so that their full importance and significance can be realized.
562
Book Reviews
To a certain extent, this is what Erikson is doing in this book, mulling over a concept and its varied possibilities. We must await his completion of the epigenetic table before his work on identity can be said to be done. There is so much in this book of interest and note that the reviewer can hardly do better than direct the reader to it for the best statment of the author’s views. However, I cannot forbear to single out Chapter 7 on “Womanhood and the Inner Space” as one of the most creative pieces of psychological writing in recent years. It brought back the moment in Ibsen’s T h e Doll’s House when Nora walks out of the house, slamming the door behind her, and opening the door to women forever in their new emancipation. Erikson, and others, have pointed to the limitations of looking at women solely within the context of the male phallus. Women are not compounded only of penis envy, masculine protest, and the castration complex. Womanhood cannot be defined only in terms of the genital trauma. Erikson sees women as enveloping their wonderfully productive interiors. They are the house that mankind has built and tended and defended. It would seem to me as important in therapy to analyze the fantasies and feelings connected with the “inner space” as to draw out the hurts associated with the genital “injury.” At the end of my reading of this book, I obtained a global perspective of people everywhere busily cultivating their own identities, inner spaces, and outer territories as a prelude to establishing their own particular “pseudospecies.” There is so much pseudoactivity in the world today and so many territorial imperatives. Of the many disciplines, child psychiatry, because of its focus on development, environment, prevention, dynamics, and organicity, appears to offer the best opportunity to “institute a new field which would have to create its own historical sophistication,” to quote Erikson. It is a field with a not too clear-cut identity at the present time and not too certain of what it is and where it is going. Provided it does not get too bogged down in administration, organization, hierarchical systems, and nit-picking considerations of role and status, it might well escape becoming one of Erikson’s pseudospecies and develop instead into a dynamic, creative, knowledgeseeking community of colleagues. Let us learn from Erikson, from history, and from the dreadful examples that surround us.