The Books of My Life: Identity’s Architect

 

As someone who has long studied the history, sociology, and anthropology of religion in core nation societies throughout much of his academic life it quickly became apparent to me that Western Christianity since the Reformation, despite its claims to be the world’s only true and universal religion was, empirically speaking,  characterised by sectarianism, characterised by division. Most Christian sects, in other words, be they Lutherans in their various and sundry forms, Calvinists in their various and sundry forms, Baptists in their various and sundry forms, or Evangelicals in their various and sundry forms, claimed and still oftentimes claim to be the one and only true form of Christianity. 

Another thing I quickly realised early in my academic career was that religion was not the only cultural meaning system that was characterised by sectarianism, by the belief that one's sect or group was the sole possessor of the truth writ large. Political culture in the West, for example, is also characterised by sectarianism as the many sects of Bolshevism each claiming to be the one true form of Bolshevik Communism point up. Interestingly, the Church of Anti-Communism in its various and sundry sectarian forms, which too claimed to have the truth on its side, accepted and fetishised the claim of Bolshevik Church of Lenin and his pope like successors that it was the one and only true variety of communism on the planet thereby ignoring, for a number of economic, political, cultural, and geographical reasons, the sectarian nature of the so-called political left and the fact that, empirically speaking, no variety of Bolshevism had a monopoly on the truth anymore than any particular variety of Christianity did.

Political culture, of course, is not the only form of extra-religious—religion is only one institutionalised and bureaucratised meaning system--sectarianism in the West. As Lawrence Friedman, who has made a career of writing biographies of psychologists and psychoanalysts including on the Menninger family and their clinic (charismatic to traditional and bureaucratic leadership in action?), Erich Fromm, and Erik Erickson, shows, intellectual and academic psychology is also sectarian. Virtually every sect within the institutionalised meaning system that is psychology whether Behavioural, Freudian, Neo-Freudians, Jungian, or Gestalt, for example, claims to have a monopoly on the truth or at the very least a monopoly on some aspect of the truth. In his Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999) Friedman explores one of the many Neo-Freudians, those who followed in the footsteps of the charismatic father of the psychoanalysis cult or new meaning system, Sigmund Freud, but who also felt compelled to revise Freud because of his lack of attention, at least in his earlier years, to broader political, economic, cultural, and geographic contexts to the chagrin of “orthodox" Freudians, the Danish born Erik Erikson.

For Friedman, who practises what Erikson, Fromm, and the Culture and Personality school both belonged to, preached, namely, the need to pay attention to broader social and cultural contexts, broader contexts in which human lives are situated, must be explored if we are to understand humans in general and Erikson in particular. Friedman argues that Erikson, who never knew who his father was—something that troubled him throughout the course of his life apparently—and someone who was Danish, German, and American if in someone different ways, became someone who was adept at crossing borders—national, theoretical, professional, disciplinary, ideological—was drawn almost inevitably because of these broader contexts to the study of identity and how identity was impacted and influenced not only by biology—a central dogmatic tenant of early Freud and his followers--but by the dynamism of a historically situated human life cycle from birth to death where identity was situated within broader spatial formations and influenced and impacted by them. Biography as the micro of the meso and the macro. 

Friedman does a nice job of exploring Erikson’s many identities across time and space. He notes that Erikson was an artist and a qualitative if not always rigorous social scientist who moved across the disciplinary boundaries of psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, and history during his long life in his many publications including what many regard as his most important book, Childhood and Society (1950), and his Young Man Luther (1958), and Gandhi’s Truth (1969). He does an excellent job of showing us Erikson the Dane, Erikson the German, Erikson the American, Erikson the romantic, Erikson the therapist, Erikson the clinician, Erikson the teacher, Erikson the academic, Erikson the sometime activist, Erikson the writer, Erikson the husband and father, Erikson the confidante, Erikson the confident, Erikson the self doubter, Erikson the mystic, and Erikson the prophet, all Erikson’s influenced by the broader social and cultural environments he moved through during the course of his life from Freud’s Vienna to FDR’s New Deal, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Vietnam, the backlash to colonialism, and Watergate, to mane a few. He does an excellent job of pointing out what he sees as the strengths and weaknesses of Erikson including his attention to historical and ethnographic contexts, his development of a modern and perhaps even postmodern understanding of identity and, along with William Shakespeare and Soren Kierkegaard, both of whom Erikson read, of the modern human life cycle, his less than rigorous approach to the stuff of society and culture, the limitations of his understanding of Gandhi’s India, his perhaps too great an emphasis on the universality and linearity of the human life cycle, and his contradictions, something all humans, of course, are, to name a few.

The problem I had with Friedman’s biography of Erikson is the same problem I have with most biographies I have read, there is a lot of what I regard as insignificant components amidst the significant details of a life making the book longer and more gossipy than it, in my opinion, needs to be. This was, for me, less a problem in Friedman’s more intellectually oriented biography of Fromm, another refugee from Germany. Those interested in the history of the social sciences and the history of psychology and psychoanalysis, the practise of psychology and psychoanalysis will find much of interest in Friedman’s well researched and documented biography of a key figure in 20th century intellectual culture, Erik Erikson.