Word: erikson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...considered fair play, a verbal means of keeping one's own balance by staying out of the magnetic attraction of a world-renowned intellectual presence. How many times have Harvard students walked through the streets around Harvard Square without seeing such figures as James Baldwin, J.K. Galbraith, Eric Erikson, Edmund Wilson, James Dickey, Robert P. Warren, Norman Mailer, to name only those whom I have personally seen. These men seem to belong in the Cambridge setting, even if in many cases they visit Harvard only as guest lecturers. It would be impolite to be too impressed by their presence, just...
Today, at 68, Erikson lives quietly in Stockbridge. Although he has not been a practicing psychoanalyst for years, a steady outpouring of books-as well as the constantly growing fame of his basic theories-has made him increasingly influential. In 1958 he produced Young Man Luther, which helped trace the Protestant Reformation to Martin Luther's resolution of Erikson's Life Stage 5 ("Identity v. Role Confusion"). He won the 1969 National Book Award for Gandhi's Truth, a study of the man, his ideals and the techniques of nonviolence. Erikson embarked upon it in part...
About his own renown Erikson is modest. All he has to offer, he says, is "a way of looking at things." At this moment in history, it is a most helpful, hopeful and even necessary way. Behind the glib label "identity" is the broad conviction that the ego is not some wavering horizon line between the superego and the id but an organized entity in which one can have what Erikson calls "accrued confidence." In the search for identity, even the generations are allowed a more positive role. Erikson was fascinated by G.B. Shaw's "eight years of solitude...
Psychic Catastrophe. In short, Erikson's thinking takes in all of life-its struggles, victories and defeats-and sees it as a gradual unfolding. It is an optimistic philosophy, but he is no pollyanna. At every turn, he believes, there is as much chance for psychic catastrophe as for emotional growth. "When I talk about hope and basic trust," he says, "I am not referring to good manners or to the niceties of personality, but to the minimum conditions for human survival...
...holding press conferences in William Sloane Coffin's living room. (The dean of the ad hoc press corps was a J. Press-outfitted Time reporter who later said that Coffin had been his Sacred Studies teacher at Andover.) The leaders of the group- Hersey and Coffin and Kenniston and Erikson- were the same people who always occupied centerstage at Yale...