Dorothy Burlingham
Kai
Jon
Mikey
Tinky
Bob
Marie (an older sketch from the Black Forest)
A Yurok Fisherman
Joseph Wheelwright
Ruth Benedict
Karla Homburger
Maria Martinez
Alexander Meiklejohn
Selecting and organizing these papers would not have been possible without the genuine interest, gentle support, and collaborative effort of Erik Erikson. His warmth, spirited nature, and thoughtfulness provided a consistent and sustaining presence for me that helped this experience hold together. I am grateful to him for affording me the privilege of serving as editor of this collection of his selected papers. This book is an expression of my deep respect and affection for him, and it is my hope that it honors him and that it is befitting his innovative contributions to the fields of psychoanalysis and human development. And to Joan Erikson, the real editor of the writings of Erik H. Erikson, I am thankful for her knowledge, decisiveness, and encouragement.
It was very meaningful to have had the support of George Brockway, editor and former chairman of W. W. Norton, whose expertise and guidance were essential at the outset of the project. I would also like to pay tribute to Linda Healey, editor at W. W. Norton, for her critical and thoughtful assistance and for the energy and skill she provided in order to steer this project toward its completion. Her participation has been invaluable. In addition, Katie Nelson at W. W. Norton has played an essential part in this process.
The following friends and colleagues have provided guidance and support along the way: Leston Havens, Mitchell Lasker, Richard Melito and Peter Williams; Mairi Staples for her superior typing skills; and Inge Schneier Hoffmann and Joachim Neugroschel, who translated the two papers from 1931 by Erikson that were originally published in German. This book would not be complete without their efforts. Certain libraries have assisted in the important task of locating these papers: the Austen Riggs Center Library (Stockbridge, Massachusetts), the Countway Library of the Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts), and the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.). My appreciation is also extended to all the publishers, editors, and organizations that granted permission to reproduce Erikson’s published writings. My deep appreciation to authors Robert Coles and Paul Roazen for their authoritative biographies of Erikson. These books often served as personal guides to which I referred for particular insights or factual data.
I owe a very special debt to the Austen Riggs Center where I was fortunate to have completed a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical psychology and where I drew a great deal of knowledge and inspiration from my teachers. It was there that I had the opportunity of first meeting Erik Erikson, in 1971.
My father, Irving Schlein, an artist in his own right, has in less tangible ways given me the necessary strength and persistence. His active participation and precise editorial commentary will never be forgotten.
I would like to pay tribute to my wife, Toby, and express my deepest appreciation for her prolonged dedication, patience, and sensitivity. She reviewed every word I wrote and provided essential editorial skills and critical reading.
Lexington, Massachusetts
February 1985
STEPHEN SCHLEIN
The idea of publishing a collection of Erik Erikson’s papers emerged one day while I was preparing a review of his writings on infancy and children’s play for a presentation to the Psychology Department at the Children’s Hospital in Boston. While I knew that many of his better-known journal articles had appeared in revised form in a number of his books, I began to realize that there was a significant number of important papers that had not been reprinted and had remained isolated as obscure journal articles unknown to most professionals in the field. I wrote to Erikson, who had been one of my teachers at the Austen Riggs Center (Stockbridge, Massachusetts), to tell him of my discovery and to suggest collecting these papers into one volume. Both Erikson and his editor at W. W. Norton, George Brockway, agreed that a volume of previously uncollected papers ranging from Erikson’s earliest writings of the 1930s and 1940s to his most recent papers of the 1970s and 1980s would be a worthwhile contribution.
The challenge I then faced was to locate all the papers. Many of them appeared in journals no longer easily accessible and available only from large medical school libraries; other papers, published in obscure periodicals, were obtainable only through a major library search. Others came from the private collections at the Austen Riggs Center and the Library of Congress; a series of unpublished papers was obtained directly from Erikson; finally, two of the earliest papers were translated from German for the express purpose of this volume.
The result is a volume of forty-seven papers, reflecting fifty years of Erikson’s work, from 1930 to 1980. Twelve of the papers appear here in print for the first time. Also included are thirteen drawings by Erikson depicting various individuals—ranging from children at the Vienna school in the 1930s to friends in later life.
It is worth noting that a number of the papers in this volume represent Erikson’s earliest writings, based on direct clinical observations of children and American Indians. These particular articles were the original documents, containing his early formulations, which were later to become the core of Childhood and Society, his best-known and most widely read publication.
No previously published journal article which later appeared in its entirety in one of Erikson’s books appears in this collection.* If, however, a journal article was substantially reworked or shortened in one of his books, it is presented in this volume in its complete original form. An important example of this is “The Dream Specimen of Psychoanalysis” (1954). While it is summarized in Identity: Youth and Crisis, a major portion of this contribution is unavailable to the reader who does not have access to the original journal article.
A complete bibliography of Erikson’s writing appears at the end of this volume in an effort to provide a clear picture of what he has written and when and where it was published. The reader will note that four papers in this collection were written with Erikson’s wife, Joan, and one with the collaboration of his son, Kai. In addition, one of the few exceptions to the fifty-year time span represented is a 1983 paper about Anna Freud. Erikson said that he was pleased that someone who had so much to do with his early professional development had been given “a special place in the book.”
None of the papers in this volume has been altered in any significant way from its original state. This fits the spirit of the preface of Identity: Youth and Crisis, where Erikson says, “I have left to each ‘period piece’ its emphasis of tone and to the whole the character of a record.” However, it was necessary, on occasion, to deal with the inevitability of repetitiousness, unavoidable in the natural overlapping of these articles, by editing particular papers. All such changes receive exact notation. Nevertheless, I hope the reader will be patient with a certain degree of repetitiousness, as Erikson reworks and rethinks his ideas under new circumstances and new surroundings, over the fifty-year period represented.
When I considered the overall plan for the book, it seemed that a thematic presentation of the articles, rather than simply a chronological one, was the most effective and convincing way to highlight the magnitude of Erikson’s contributions. In fact, the articles seemed to fall naturally into a series of thematic-chapter headings, covering a wide spectrum of topics and providing some unity and coherence to a half century of writing. It is hoped that this style of organization gives the reader a richer appreciation of the substance of the papers. Erikson has added new words and phrases to our language that signify new ways to appreciate the meaning and complexity of human behavior. The thematic-chapter headings used emphasize some of these contributions. At times, deciding in which chapter a paper should be placed was difficult. In those cases, when an article covers a range of thematic areas—e.g., a paper about aspects of the life cycle with a cross-cultural, environmental focus—it has been placed where it seems to make the most sense to the overall organization of the book.
The five contributions appearing in the first chapter, “Psychoanalysis and Enlightenment,” take the reader back in time to Vienna, where Erikson lived from 1927 to 1933, and provide a sense of his first encounters with the field of psychoanalysis and a glimpse of some of his early visions. Three papers represent his earliest publications, from 1930 and 1931. The two remaining articles are more recent, from 1980 and 1983. The papers deal with Erikson’s beginnings in the field as a Montessori-trained teacher in the Vienna school and as a student in training in psychoanalysis.
During the summer of 1927 Erik Homburger Erikson, a young artist living alternately in his hometown of Karlsruhe, Germany, and in Florence, Italy, unsure of his professional direction, was encouraged by his childhood friend Peter Blos to come to Vienna to draw portraits of Dorothy Burlingham’s children. This led to Erikson’s joining the teaching staff at an experimental school established by Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham and directed by Blos. Erikson was unaware at the time that this was to become one of the most fateful moments in his life. For he was to meet the circle around Sigmund Freud and was eventually to be invited to become a candidate for psychoanalytic training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. His “training analyst” was to be Anna Freud.
The paper that opens this first chapter, “Dorothy Burlingham’s School in Vienna” (1980), was written at Anna Freud’s request for the Bulletin of the Hampstead Clinic, on the occasion of Dorothy Burlingham’s death. It is coauthored with Joan Erikson, who also taught at the Vienna School. The Eriksons explain how the school was “dreamed up” by Dorothy Burlingham, Eva Rosenfeld, and Anna Freud in the late 1920s for children of different nationalities whose parents were undergoing analysis and who themselves were undergoing child analysis. During that period there was a growing interest in developing new pedagogic ways in the field of education based on the impact of psychoanalysis. This was the spirit with which the school was created, and it became for the Eriksons an innovative experience. The atmosphere emphasized the vital components of engagement, adventure, and involvement for children, emerging from the “free spirit” of the experimental project method. It was during this experience in Vienna that Erikson witnessed the period of ascendance of ego psychology with its emphasis on the importance of the ego’s relation to the social-cultural environment.
The second paper in this chapter, “Psychoanalysis and the Future of Education,” emerged from these philosophical beginnings and expresses the hope that society can achieve a utopian upbringing of children through psychological enlightenment. Erikson presented the paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1930, while he was still in psychoanalytic training. It is worth noting that Erikson studied clinical psychoanalysis with such prominent figures as August Aichhorn, Edward Bibring, Helene Deutsche, Paul Federn, Heinz Hartmann, and Ernst Kris as well as with Anna Freud.
This paper and the two others from the early 1930s were originally published in German in a Viennese journal, Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik, devoted to furthering the relationship between psychoanalysis and education. The editorial staff consisted of individuals such as August Aichhorn, Paul Federn, and Anna Freud. The journal, which began in 1926, continued until 1938, when Austria was invaded. It was around that time that the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child first appeared in the United States with a continued dedication to the development of psychoanalysis and its application to the field of education. In 1935, when Erikson was in America, “Psychoanalysis and the Future of Education” was translated into English and was published in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. As Erikson’s first published paper, both in German and in English, it truly deserves a special place of its own in this volume.
Two papers from 1931, “Children’s Picture Books” and “The Fate of the Drives in School Compositions,” appear in English for the first time in this collection. Reflecting the mood of the Vienna circle and the influence of Anna Freud especially, Erikson continued to discuss the mysteries of childhood. While describing how children project their inner worlds into their written compositions and drawings, he resisted the temptation of the time to see only the subjective or emotional side of the child’s artistic efforts. In Robert Coles’s biography of Erikson, he says, “The reader is made to realize that children draw and write about things that have both an objective and a subjective meaning”.*
The last paper in this chapter was written in 1983 as a personal tribute to Anna Freud following her death. In response to an invitation to contribute to a special issue of the Bulletin of the Hampstead Clinic, Erikson was asked to comment about her position in history. While the article highlighted many areas of her professional and personal life, its unique contribution is its focus on how Anna Freud’s life history “touched” Erik Erikson’s. Thus the paper adds a vital component to this first chapter on Erikson’s years in Vienna. Anna Freud shared a waiting room with her father at Berggasse 19, the building where the Freud family lived and where they worked at psychoanalysis. It is here that Erikson began his training analysis with Anna Freud in 1927. In his autobiographical notes he refers to this period as a “truly astounding adoption by the Freudian circle.” He remembers the atmosphere in Vienna as “one of intense mutual loyalty and a deep devotion to a truly liberating idea.”† In reviewing the format for this volume, he said that to have papers about Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham in the introductory chapter conveyed for him “a poetic sense.”
One of the other unique sections of the book is Chapter III, “War Memoranda.” During World War II the Institute of Intercultural Studies, a national wartime body, was formed to study German psychological warfare. Erik Erikson served as a consultant to one of its committees, the Committee for National Morale. He prepared position papers that focused on national character studies of Germany. The committee was formed to supply information and advisory services to various policy-making agencies. It brought together experts from many fields, including psychology and the social sciences. Some of the other renowned participants were Gordon Allport, Gregory Bateson, Edwin Boring, Kurt Lewin, Margaret Mead, Gardner Murphy, and Henry A. Murray.
Erikson’s contributions to the Committee for National Morale have been on file at the Library of Congress as part of the collected papers of Margaret Mead. Five of these papers appear here in print for the first time. Erikson has referred to these unpublished papers as “war memoranda” and noted that “they had to be tentative since they dealt with history that was very much still in progress.” The papers represent his first psychohistorical writings and present a microscopic analysis of a particular moment in world history. This period in Erikson’s life was an important part of his early experiences in the United States, as a German immigrant, writing about a war that pitted his two countries against each other. He said that “the goal was to say what would be useful to America and not to be vengeful.” Robert Coles remarks on these papers in his biography of Erikson: “As one goes through those old unpublished manuscripts, the clinical investigator who wrote them seems familiarly like the one who went to study the Sioux and the Yurok: appreciative as well as analytic, an observer of action as well as one who listens to free associations, the relaxed (and at times vastly amused) participant, who only later mulls things over and makes recommendations.”*
In my communication with Erikson he suggested that I consider a title for the book beyond the more formal heading of “Selected Papers.” Freud predicted in the exploration of the psychology of the ego that “it will be difficult to avoid what is already familiar and that it is more a question of new ways of looking at things and new groupings of the facts than of making new discoveries.”† In keeping with Freud’s distinction, one recognizes how Erikson adopted a view of his own contribution in 1950, in the closing chapter of Childhood and Society, where he said, “I have nothing to offer except a way of looking at things.”** In an effort to find one overall theme that orchestrated this collection of papers, I realized that an unusual unity of theme and purpose was perceptible in the evolution of Erikson’s psychosocial, ego-psychological formulations, as portrayed by the title A Way of Looking at Things.
Erikson entered psychoanalysis from the field of art, where he had been a children’s portrait painter. It appears that he brought with him a configurational perspective which helped explain how things “hang together” and “hold together.” As he built a bridge between art and psychoanalysis, he developed a configurational view of children’s play which was influenced by Freud’s emphasis on the vital importance of dreams. This contextual affinity considered how visual configurations precede words and formulations and observed that children’s play, dreams, and free associations are visual data, originating from a series of images, only later put into words. Yet, as Erikson expanded his notion of a psychosocial theory of human existence, it emerged as a critical departure from Freud’s psycho-sexual model of man. This perspective was an alternative to a focus on causality and the traumatological model and to the energy-libido theory of psychoanalysis. Erikson avoided seeing everything as a symbol for “something else” and believed that the human mind was more than drives and instincts. He emphasized a homeostatic quality of the organism rather than psychopathology. The configurational view studied the interaction and convergence of multiple processes and recurrent patterns. This was highlighted in Childhood and Society when Erikson said, “In recent years we have come to the conclusion that a neurosis is psycho-and somatic, psycho-and social, and interpersonal,”* three aspects of human experience organized by a process of ego synthesis. It is here that his multidimensional perspective demonstrates the integration and convergence of various processes—biological, psychological, social, cultural, communal, and historical. These processes are seen as aspects of one process—i.e., human life and human existence.
Erikson’s contextual way of looking at the world refers to his perspective of human growth and development. This configurational approach expresses his commitment to the strength of the human ego, to the conception that adult maturity is not the end of psychological growth, and to comprehension of the coherence of a person’s unique qualities. His vision of the organic unity of the human life cycle utilizes a life-history perspective, in contrast with a case-history model, focusing not on interpretation but on the search for continuity in a given life—the life of a real human being. Erikson looks for the hopeful and active part of the person and for how human experience and human potential are organized in the communal environment, within a radius of significant social encounters. These themes run throughout the articles and papers in this volume as the reader finds Erikson painting contexts and backgrounds.
At Erik Erikson’s eightieth birthday celebration in 1982, Daniel Schwartz, medical director of the Austen Riggs Center, presented a personal tribute and said, “Erikson began as a young artist. He became a psychoanalyst who helped all of us to see more clearly. In studies of dreams, of children’s play, in the explication of the regularities in our sense of psychological space as influenced by our bodies and our cultures, he has helped us define crucial configurations.”
* Examples are: (1) “Observations on Sioux Education,” first published in 1939 and later appearing in Childhood and Society; (2) “The Nature of Clinical Evidence,” first published in 1958 and later appearing in Insight and Responsibility; and (3) “The Problem of Ego Identity,” first published in 1956 and later appearing in Identity: Youth and Crisis.
* Robert Coles, Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 30.
† Erik Erikson, Autobiographic Notes on the Identity Crisis. “Daedalus (Fall 1970), 744; ibid., p. 735.
* Coles, op. cit., 99.
† Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, tr. J. H. Sprott (New York: W. W. Norton, 1933, 86.
** Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 359.
*Ibid., 23.