Word: erikson
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...those who think an optimistic Freudian is like a Swiss admiral, there is always Erik Erikson. Freud's vision, despite his promise of healing, was a dark one, overlaid with personal and cultural pessimism. Erikson, now 72 and in semiretirement in California, is probably the most influential living psychoanalyst and certainly the most optimistic thinker the Freudian tradition has produced. His famous work on religious leaders (Luther, Gandhi) attempts to show how men can use neurotic conflict for constructive social purposes while healing themselves in the process...
...recent years, Erikson has been the target of growing criticism. Students complain of the ambiguity and elusiveness of his pronouncements. Feminists denounce him for his 1963 essay, Womanhood and the Inner Space, in which he insisted that anatomy is destiny, and that a woman is "never not a woman." He recently repudiated his long-held sunny view of the American character and depicted the nation as a world bully that has "transgressed against humanity and nature." One of his critics, University of Michigan Psychologist David Gutmann, wrote in Commentary last fall that Erikson "has begun to sound less like...
...collection of essays and lectures, Life History and the Historical Moment (Norton; $9.95), Erikson returns to some of these issues...
Past Jefferson lecturers, who hold their appointments for a year, were Robert Penn Warren, Erik H. Erikson and Lionel Trilling...
...fuse the insights of psychology and psychoanalysis with those of history, and the big league of the burgeoning academic movement is the annual Wellfleet seminar on Cape Cod. At this year's closed meeting, such luminaries as Kenneth Keniston and Robert Jay Lifton were there. So was Erik Erikson (Young Man Luther, Gandhi's Truth), the founding spirit of the movement and the group. But the center of attention this year was Doris Kearns, probably the first aspiring psychohistorian to be prodded into print by her subject...