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Paul Roazen begins Erik H. Erikson: The Power and Limits of a Vision by pointing out some of these surface similarities between the Freud and Erikson schools. Freud grounded his theory of the primacy of sexual drive in a new and suggestive vocabulary (libido, repression, transference, regression) that was assimilated widely, if often too crudely. The same fate has befallen Erikson's catch-words "identity crisis," "life cycle," and the adjective "psycho-social." Freud also cultivated his Vienna Circle, which he assembled to carry on his legacy after his death; while Erikson never has sought to institutionalize his influence...
Like Marx, finally, who looked upon the misinterpretation and trivialization of his ideas and declared that he must not be a Marxist, and Freud, who disowned his potential heirs because of the violence he felt they had done to his theoretical system, Erikson has had to dissassociate himself, genteelly, from much of the simplistic garbage that has appeared under the banner of "psycho-history...
...UNLIKE FREUD, HOWEVER, Erikson can take criticism. Instead of attributing attacks on him to his critics' own insecurity, he has always been quick to re-examine his own thinking and acknowledge its limitations. Even his most skeptical critics--such as Frederick Crews, who reviewed Erikson's last book of Life History and the Historical Moment in the New York Review of Books--praise him for precisely that thoughtfulness and candor. And it speaks to this ongoing curiosity and self-questioning, rare enough for an established thinker whose theories have gained such wide recognition and acclaim, that just as Roazen published...
...sexuality, existential angst, class consciousness and false consciousness--but in different proportions for different people. Yet Erikson is one step ahead of this objection; as Roazen notes, he is quick to admit that his insights are not comprehensive explanations of personality. Erikson once suggested that modern thinkers should incorporate Freud as a theorist of sex, and Marx as a theorist of work. Playing on Freud's famous dictum that "anatomy is destiny," Erikson has taken the less reductionist view that "anatomy, history and personality are our combined destiny...
...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-fulfilling relation...