Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson. - book reviews

Adolescence,  Summer, 1999  

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WALLERSTEIN, Robert S., & GOLDBERGER, Leo (Eds.). Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1998. 411pp. (h).

This book presents a panoramic overview of the life and work of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Along with a biographical locating of Erikson in the socio-cultural history of his century, his formative contributions to a wide array of human endeavors are explored - social science, religion, life span development, history and biography, philosophy - each by a scholar, linked to Erikson, and situated at the interface between psychoanalysis, Erikson's psychosocial psychoanalysis, and the cognate realm of human intelligence in which that scholar works. This overview is amplified by a selection of Erikson's seminal and pivotal papers. Interspersed with these contributions are the articulation of Erikson's working credo, set forth in his 1950 resignation speech from university teaching during the McCarthy-era witch hunts, and two current appreciations of Erikson's contemporary impact, one from within psychoanalysis, locating him as a largely unacknowledged forerunner of the object relational perspectives currently transforming the traditional ego psychological structure of American psychoanalysis, and the other by a historian, the currently authorized biographer of Erikson, with a broad-brush overview of Erikson's place in the larger intellectual world.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Libra Publishers, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group