Erik H. Erikson

The landmark work on the social significance of childhood. The original and vastly influential ideas of Erik H. Erikson underlie much of our understanding of human development. His insights into the interdependence of the individuals' growth and historical change, his now-famous concepts of identity, growth, and the life cycle, have changed the way we perceive ourselves and society. Widely read and cited, his works have won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Combining the insights of clinical psychoanalysis with a new approach to cultural anthropology, Childhood and Society deals with the relationships between childhood training and cultural accomplishment, analyzing the infantile and the mature, the modern and the archaic elements in human motivation. It was hailed upon its first publication as "a rare and living combination of European and American thought in the human sciences" (Margaret Mead, The American Scholar). Translated into numerous foreign languages, it has gone on to become a classic in the study of the social significance of childhood.

Childhood and Society

Essays in ego psychology, based on papers written from 1951 to 1967, by a neo-Freudian analyst and theorist.

Identity: Youth and Crisis

Joan M. Erikson

Featuring a new chapter on a ninth stage of life, "Very Old Age," a study of the developmental stages in the human life cycle examines such themes as the interdependence of history and life history and the definition of maturity

The Life Cycle Completed (Extended Version)

A Western psychoanalyst and historian presents a detailed examination of the philosophies accepted by Gandhi and his attempts to convert the British through nonviolence

Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence

In this psychobiography, Erik H. Erikson brings his insights on human development and the identity crisis to bear on the prominent figure of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther.

Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History

Erik H. Erikson er, takket være sin store indsigt og sin levende stil, blevet en af de mest læste af de moderne psykoanalytiske forfattere. Han havde i mange år sit virke ved amerikanske universiteter og forskningsinstitutioner, bl.a. som professor i psykiatri og Human Development ved Harvard University. I Identitet – ungdom og kriser sammenfatter og videreudvikler Erikson sine teorier om identiteten i et foranderligt samfund, her med fokus på ungdommen. Der redegøres grundigt og med mange eksempler for de unges identitetsdannelse og -problemer, og Erikson leverer interessante bidrag til en forståelse af såvel køns- som raceidentitet. Identitet – ungdom og kriser udkom første gang på dansk i 1971 og genudgives nu i Hans Reitzels Forlags serie Klassikere.

Ungdom og kriser

Identitet

In this study of Mahatma Gandhi, psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson explores how Gandhi succeeded in mobilizing the Indian people both spiritually and politically as he became the revolutionary innovator of militant non-violence and India became the motherland of large-scale civil disobedience.

In a moment in our history beset with grave doubts, Erik H. Erickson inquires into the nature and structure of the shared visions which invigorate some eras and seemed so fatefully lacking in others. He illustrates the human propensity for play and vision, from the toy world of childhood to the dream life of adults, and from the artist's imagination to the scientist's reason. Finally, he enlarges on the origins and structure of one shared vision of universal significance, namely, the American Dream. Such a worldview, he concludes, consists of both vision and counter vision (political and religious, economic and technological, artistic and scientific) which vie with each other to give a coherent meaning to shared realities and to liberate individual and communal energy. Erickson postulates that a space-time orientation provided by a viable worldview is, complimentary to the inner work of the individual psyche and is attuned to its multiple functions. In a central chapter, the author links the phylogeny and the ontogeny of worldviews by describing stages in the ritualization of everyday life—that is, the interplay of customs (including the use of language) with from birth to death convey and confirm the "logic" of the visions predominant or contending in a society. He emphasizes the playful and yet compelling power of viable ritualization to connect individual growth with the maintenance of a vital institutions; but he also illustrates the fateful tendency of human interplay to turn into self-deception and collusion, of ritualization to become deadly ritualism—and of visions to end in nightmares of alienation and distraction. Erickson advocates the pooling of interdisciplinary insights in order to clarify the conscious and unconscious motivation which works for or against the more universal and more insightful worldview essential in a technological age.

Toys and Reasons: Stages in the Ritualization of Experience

The two lectures presented in this important volume were delivered by Erik H. Erikson at the second annual Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities, sponsored by The National Endowment for the Humanitites. In the first lecture, entitled "The Founders: Jeffersonion Action and Faith," Erikson uses selected themes from Jefferson's life to illustrate some principles of psychohistory. In the second lecture, "The Inheritors: Modern Insight and Foresight," Erikson applied his main concepts to the problems of ongoing history. The title of the lectures contains one such concept. "New identity" is the result of radical historical change and is here meant to characterize the emerging American identity as first embodied in such men as Jefferson. Erikson first explores certain themes in his examination of the emerging American identity during Jefferson's time. He then attempts to relate the Jeffersonian themes to contemporary problems of repression and suppression, of moralistic vindication, and true liberation by insight. Finally, Erikson maintains that now that children will be born by the privileged choice of parental persons, an adult environment fitting the living and the to-be-living becomes an ethical necessity. There is no question that this work ranks among Erikson's most challenging and seminal books.

Dimensions of a New Identity

Helen Q. Kivnick

Erikson's now-famous concept of the life cycle delineates eight stages of psychological development through which each of us progresses. The last stage, old age, challenges the individual to rework the past while remaining involved in the present. The authors begin this work with their theory of life's stages through old age. In Part two, they discuss their interviews with twenty-nine octogenarians, on whom life history data has been collected for over fifty years. Part three is a discussion of the life history of the protagonist in Ingmar Bergman's film Wild Strawberries. In Part four, "Old age in our society", the authors offer suggestions for "vital involvement." Erik H. Erikson is winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Vital Involvement in Old Age

One of the most powerful (though deceptively simple) of current ideas is Erik H. Erikson's insight into the nature of the interrelationships of the psychogenic development of an individual and the historical development of the times. 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.

Life History and the Historical Moment: Diverse Presentations

René Dubos

C. A. Doxiadis

The symposium produced some important ideas which will be invaluable in the planning of more workable cities and in the reorganization of society to give citizens the maximum of community life and the maximum of diversity.

City for Human Development

Anthropopolis

Erik H. Erikson's remarkable insights into the relationship of life history and history began with observations on a central stage of life: identity development in adolescence. This book collects three early papers that—along with Childhood and Society—many consider the best introduction to Erikson's theories. "Ego Development and Historical Change" is a selection of extensive notes in which Erikson first undertook to relate to each other observations on groups studied on field trips and on children studied longitudinally and clinically. These notes are representative of the source material used for Childhood and Society. "Growth and Crises of the Health Personality" takes Erikson beyond adolescence, into the critical stages of the whole life cycle. In the third and last essay, Erikson deals with "The Problem of Ego Identity" successively from biographical, clinical, and social points of view—all dimensions later pursued separately in his work.

Identity and the Life Cycle

În această carte de referință pentru psihologia dezvoltării umane, Erik Erikson combină profundele intuiții ale psihanalizei cu datele empirice ale antropologiei culturale, pentru a evidenția legăturile strânse dintre educația copilului și constrângerile socioculturale. Publicată în 1950 și reeditată în mai multe rânduri, cartea de față are meritul de a fi aplicat cu succes teoria freudiană a sexualității infantile la „munca de teren“ a antropologiei. Astfel, autorul a studiat două triburi amerindiene, comparându-le diversele moduri de educație și socializare ale copiilor. Plecând de aici, a elaborat teoria celor opt stadii ale dezvoltării Eului, concepție care a rămas extrem de influentă până în prezent. Cartea oferă analize revelatorii asupra civilizației nord-americane, la care se adaugă două inedite psihobiografii dedicate lui Hitler și Maxim Gorki.

Copilărie și societate

In the six essays contained in this text the author reflects on the ethical implications of psychoanalytical insight. Among the topics covered are: Freud's discovery that the human mind can only be studied through a partnership between observer and observed; how clinical evidence is made up of a unique mixture of subjective and objective; an observation on the way issues of identity affect not only individuals but classes of people; and an examination of the links between ego formation and institutions and traditions. Erikson also discusses the origins of ethics and looks at psychiatry as the pragmatic Western version of the universal journey to self-awareness.

Erik H. Erikson

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