Michael talked a bit about Eric Erikson and concluded his
comment with some very kind words about me so I thought I would take the
occasion to tell you all the little bit I can about my experience with Erikson.
The year that I started my instructorship at Harvard, 1958, was the year that
David Reisman was appointed to a university professorship there. Reisman’s
office was on the third floor of Emerson Hall where the Social Relations Department
had its home. He had the habit of
gathering around him a group of young untenured faculty and when I published a
letter in the New York Times which caught his eye, he dropped me a note and
suggested that I come by. I found my way to his office and in the deferential
way in which junior faculty then spoke to senior faculty I said that I hoped I
was not disturbing him. He welcomed me into his office and complained that although
he was just down the hall from Mr. Sociology (by whom he meant Talcott
Parsons), he never talked to the great man and nobody ever came to see him. I
became part of a group of antiwar pro-nuclear disarmament folks around Reisman who
called themselves The Committee of Correspondence, taking their title from a
group during the American Revolution. We published a newsletter (in which my
student and later friend and co-teacher Todd Gitlin regularly published) and
met from time to time. When Erikson joined the faculty, I think in 1960, he
became part of the group and that was when I met him.
Erikson was an odd duck. At the age of 58 he was roughly 10
years older than Reisman and since I was then 26, they both seemed ancient to
me. Erikson had a shock of white hair and as I recall sparkling blue eyes and
he made quite an impression on me. I found him very distant and have no
recollection of having an actual one-on-one conversation with him in the time I
knew him, but the graduate students and young instructors who served as his
assistants in the course he taught loved him and idolized him. It is my
impression, rather than my genuine recollection, that some young folks who
later became quite distinguished served as his assistants in those days.
Reisman, by the way, had the quite extraordinary habit of reading and writing
extended comments on each of the essays submitted by the hundreds of students
who took his large lecture courses, even though it took him well into the next
semester to complete the task.
Erikson had published Childhood and Society in 1950 and I
read it, I believe, sometime during my years at Harvard. It had a very great
effect on me and I have quoted from it often in all the years since. The
centerpiece of the book, of course, is Erikson’s expansion of Freud’s three
stages of psychosexual development in the young child – the anal, the oral, and
the genital – to a total of eight stages stretching throughout life. He is one
of the great theorists of what came to be called Ego Psychology. One of the
things in the book that I found particularly impressive was Erikson’s report of
fieldwork he had done among Native Americans in the northwestern United States
which enabled him to draw contrasts and comparisons between their stages of
psychosexual development and those of Europeans and Americans of European
descent.
When I came to write my long 800 page autobiography on this
blog, I chose a passage from Childhood and Society as the epigraph for it.
