The Stages of Man

It is certain that there was once a man called Freud. He lived in Vienna from 1860 to 1938, and by using a new therapeutic technique called psychoanalysis, he evolved a radical theory of human personality based on the importance of early childhood and its persistence as a state of mind in everyone. But. as Auden has remarked, Freud has been transmogrified into "a whole climate of opinion."

His theories have always been freely --sometimes wildly--adapted in art and literature. But most of Freud's own followers limited his legacy by insisting at least as firmly as he did that only the early years of life are substantially formative. The Freudian disciple who can be credited with broadening the original theory and restoring its vitality is a mild, German-born analyst and teacher named Erik Erikson. His now famous notion that a man's whole lifetime moves through a series of discernible and crucial stages grew largely out of Erikson's own personal development. That development is skillfully and admiringly traced in Erik H. Erikson, The Growth of His Work (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $10), a new biography by Harvard Child Psychiatrist Robert Coles.

Crippling Dread. It was the publication of Childhood and Society in 1950, Coles notes, that established Erikson's reputation. In that book, Erikson divided life into eight stages, and discussed the emotional conflict that he feels dominates each major step: from infancy ("Basic Trust v. Mistrust") to adolescence ("Identity v. Role Confusion") to adulthood ("Generativity v. Stagnation") to old age ("Ego Integrity v. Despair"). At each stage the crisis must be resolved if the person is to be unharmed by crippling dread or neurosis. At least from adolescence on, the role of society in general, and even the shaping force of contemporary history, becomes crucial to individual fate.

For Freudian thinkers, mostly stranded in the formative childhood stage, Erikson's concept was liberating. With the whole of human life their province, psychoanalysts could look cultural anthropologists or social psychologists in the eye and start sharing observed knowledge. The concept has also convinced a whole younger generation of social activists--including Author Coles --that children more than five years old are not irrevocably molded and that those who are poor in their early years can later make up for their deprived background.

In the popular mind, Erikson is perhaps best known for the catch phrase "identity crisis," used to describe the struggle the individual may face during adolescence. As he observed later: "If ever an identity crisis was central and long-drawn-out in somebody's life, it was so in mine." His Danish parents were separated when he was born in 1902, and he grew up in Karlsruhe, Germany, with his mother and stepfather, a Jewish pediatrician. He had little interest in school and at 18 began several years of wandering about in the Black Forest and northern Italy as "a transitional beatnik." He drew constantly and studied painting. But in 1927 a friend who had already joined Freud's circle invited Erikson to Vienna to help him run a school he was starting for the children of Freud's patients and students.

Idyllic Atmosphere. Erikson accepted and stayed on, gradually putting aside his notion of the artist's life as he became more deeply involved in the almost idyllic atmosphere that surrounded the master. Analysis was shorter then and less formal; social relations between doctor and patient were not yet suspect. Erikson taught the children, was analyzed by Anna Freud and gradually became a practicing child analyst himself. He has no university degree.

The first thrusts of Nazi power broke up the magic circle; in 1933 Erikson and his Canadian-born wife migrated to the U.S. His studies variously took him to Berkeley, Cambridge and the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass. He has spent time in the poor sections of Pittsburgh and on two Indian reservations, where he reflected upon the wisdom of "primitive" child-rearing practices. During World War II he did research assignments for the Government, and afterward worked four years to complete Childhood and Society.

Today, at 68, Erikson lives quietly in Stockbridge. Although he has not been a practicing psychoanalyst for years, a steady outpouring of books--as well as the constantly growing fame of his basic theories--has made him increasingly influential. In 1958 he produced Young Man Luther, which helped trace the Protestant Reformation to Martin Luther's resolution of Erikson's Life Stage 5 ("Identity v. Role Confusion"). He won the 1969 National Book Award for Gandhi's Truth, a study of the man, his ideals and the techniques of nonviolence. Erikson embarked upon it in part, he says, "because it was time for me to write about the responsibilities of middle age."

About his own renown Erikson is modest. All he has to offer, he says, is "a way of looking at things." At this moment in history, it is a most helpful, hopeful and even necessary way. Behind the glib label "identity" is the broad conviction that the ego is not some wavering horizon line between the superego and the id but an organized entity in which one can have what Erikson calls "accrued confidence." In the search for identity, even the generations are allowed a more positive role. Erikson was fascinated by G.B. Shaw's "eight years of solitude" spent trying to become a writer. Shaw's line "I work as my father drank" meant to Erikson that a child is capable of turning both the virtues and vices of his parents to his own uses.

Psychic Catastrophe. In short, Erikson's thinking takes in all of life--its struggles, victories and defeats--and sees it as a gradual unfolding. It is an optimistic philosophy, but he is no pollyanna. At every turn, he believes, there is as much chance for psychic catastrophe as for emotional growth. "When I talk about hope and basic trust," he says, "I am not referring to good manners or to the niceties of personality, but to the minimum conditions for human survival."

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