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IDEAS AND IDENTITIES: THE LIFE AND WORK OF ERIK ERIKSON.
Robert S. Wallerstein & Leo Goldberger (Eds.). Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1998, 411 pp.
IDENTITY'S ARCHITECT: A BIOGRAPHY OF ERIK H. ERIKSON.
Lawrence J. Friedman. New York: Scribner, 1999, 592 pp.
"It is personalities, not principles, that move the age."
-Oscar Wilde
In a memorial tribute to Erik Erikson in The Psychoanalytic Review, Jeffrey Golland (1997) laments that "... something has gone awry between psychoanalysis and Erik Erikson. His work is hardly cited in our journals nor assigned in our institutes. In expanding the bounds of psychoanalysis, he has, it seems, been evicted from its narrow environs" (p. 326). I would expand Golland's contention beyond the generally all too "narrow environs" of psychoanalysis and suggest that Erikson, once embraced by clinical social workers for his recognition that societal and cultural forces have an impact on the individual, is being marginalized in most of the mental health professions, including social work. What was once considered visionary thinking on a variety of clinical and social issues is in danger of being reduced to an overly simplified eight stage model of the life cycle. When mentioned, even this is presented as of primarily historical interest, but of little real use in an increasingly deconstructionist, postmodern clinical social work education. There are multiple levels of irony here. First, Erikson's work could add much to any deconstructionist or postmodern dialogue or, at least, as Lawrence Friedman (1999) asserts "However the postmodern condition is assessed, Erikson's life and writings would seem to present material for an instructive prologue" (p. 478). A second irony is that the life cycle model itself, his most frequently cited contribution, seems generally to be misunderstood. The final irony becomes all the more obvious when one realizes that some of the best-selling "clinical" books-- those pushing Erikson and other profound thinkers aside-concern "treatment planning," i.e. writing measurable goals and objectives that can be read by managed care company computers or similarly disposed employees. The human being as machine mentality that Erikson so feared seems to be winning out.
There are a variety of reasons that Erikson's work has been relegated to lower tiers of influence-some petty, some quite legitimate. Among the more petty has been the...