Word: erikson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Roazen comes up with his most thought-provoking criticisms on an issue that he never quite makes explicit. He warns that Erikson's "life cycle" theory--his notion of stable growth through eight life stages--can be seen as tacitly endorsing conformity and political conservatism. A celebration of normality can translate into an uncritical endorsement of the status quo, Roazen argues...
...Erikson proposes, "a sense of identity implies that one experiences an over-all sameness and continuity extending from the personal past...into a tangible future; and from the community's past...into foreseeable and imaginable realities of work accomplishment and role satisfaction," then there may be disadvantages to having a secure sense of self...in a broader perspective one has to question whether he has not put too much trust in the benign functions of the social order...
This is an important point, but it really requires more concrete examples than Roazen musters. Perhaps the best evidence for this charge that Erikson has misplaced faith in the "genius of old culture" lies in Erikson's brief discussion of the older Luther in Young Man Luther. Erikson attributes Luther's shift in doctrine from the fervent, ascetic preparation for the hereafter to an acceptance and appreciation of man's place on earth as part of God's grand design to his mature acceptance of the limitations on his powers and shortcomings. Yet Luther had also moved into closer...
...these represent some limits of Erikson's vision, however, the power still remains, as Roazen notes admiringly throughout his critique. It is a power that derives from Erikson's determination to concentrate on the positive strengths of man's ego, rather than on the negative threat of the aggressive id, as Freud did. Erikson's work is full of words like "adaptation," "leeway," "growth," and "ingenuity;" he moves past Sigmund and Anna Freud's focus on the defenses that repress or rechannel erupting inner drives, emphasizing instead the "potentialities" of fuller ego-adaption, attained through a mutually reinforcing and self...
...Toys and Reasons, Erikson adds a third element to Freud's description--play. Starting with a vaguely Piagetian hypothesis that play with toys allows children to heighten their awareness of the relation between the subjective "I" and the surrounding world, Erikson goes on to sketch a very rough schema of the ways people in our culture continue to grow and negotiate their place in society through various forms of ritualized game-playing. He finally extends his discussion to military war games and the anti-war movement of the 1960s, and the brief glimpse it gave of the potential of ritualized...