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Lawrence J. Friedman. Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 600 pp., $20.95 (paper).
Lawrence Friedman's biography of the great lay psychoanalyst Erik Erikson has all the components of a first-rate biography: it illustrates the social and historical contexts through the mirror of a single and singular life, shows the complex relationship between a life and work without resorting to polemic or hagiography, and it at once both resists and affirms a coherent life process. If there is a fundamental theme here it is that Erikson, the man who theorized identity formation and crisis more fully than any other 20th century psychologist, had his own identity crisis. Abandoned as child by his father, and having left his birthplace, Denmark, for Germany and eventually the United States, Erikson was constantly refashioning himself. He became a native of no place in particular, was never sure of his religious and national loyalties, and, as Friedman describes throughout, always latching onto different father figures. There was a step-father, then Freud as a mythical father,...