Word: thinker
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...SEEMS a fascinating, if somewhat unsettling thing, that one thinker should be able to "father" a whole generation of intellectual offspring. Yet this appears to be the way psychoanalytic trends have progressed. The psychoanalytic movement itself began with the family of inheritors Freud carefully gathered around him in Vienna. With Freud the process became ironic, though, as it took on all the trappings of his Oedipal complex. He played his parental role to the hilt, demanding reverence and respect, and finished by lamenting the Oedipal pattern of his 'son's' jealousy and betrayal when one after another his heirs began...
...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 the first comprehensive critique of Erikson's corpus, Erikson himself finished Toys and Reasons, a fragmentary but thought-provoking book that addresses itself to most of Roazen's major objections...
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...
Tiger [1950, 1962, 1974]--You are a person of great extremes. A sympathetic and considerate friend. A powerful and dangerous enemy. In your career you are both a deep thinker and a careful planner...
...philosopher Alain, who had exerted such a formative influence on her ideas about life fifteen years earlier, might have answered her plea with this definition of truth (paraphrased from his informal "doctrine" by Petrement): "an idea is not true by itself, independent of the thinker: it is not right to speak of a true idea but rather of true thoughts, of true men and women." Simone Weil lived this definition. And it may be that in the end she feld that only letting herself die could she continue to live her truth