Word: erikson
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...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...
...same problems Roazen points out in his critique of Erikson are in evidence in Toys and Reasons. When Erikson describes how seeing Rembrandt's Annunciation in California's DeYoung Museum led him to new and exciting thoughts about the role of perspective in establishing identity, he probably overestimates the general appeal of these insights. And when he rejoices over the spirit of gamesmanship that went into the founding of America and the Constitution, and goes on to praise the "leeway" that American society has allowed for people to test their psycho-social potential, in his excitement he seems to ignore...
...Erikson has heard these criticisms before and acknowledges them...
...response, Erikson makes an impassioned case for what he calls "re-ritualization,"--a restoration to all segments of society forms for playful group interaction in a society that rapidly is becoming, as Michael Walzer puts it, more and more "radically disconnected...
BECAUSE OF HIS OPTIMISM and passion, Erikson merits admiration not just as an exciting thinker, but for being a thoughtful and caring humanist. Robert Coles made just this point in an exchange he had with MIT professor Bruce Mazlish in the New York Review of Books letter column several years ago. Mazlish, who wrote a crude psycho-biography of our former chief executive called In Search of Nixon, had attacked Coles for panning a group of similar psycho-biographies. He called Coles a traitor to the field and made a "Well, Erikson was just telling me over lunch" sort...