The name of Erik Erikson has been associated ever since the 1940's with a number of major innovations in the field of psychoanalytic theory. He is most closely identified with the concept of ego identity—a term that now adorns Radcliffe term papers and Gay Lib manifestoes no less than the most respectable psychiatric case studies—but he is also the chief begetter of the new field of psychohistory, through his pioneering studies of Martin Luther, Gandhi, and, more recently, Huey Newton and Thomas Jefferson, as well as the author of penetrating and original studies of the American national character.

That Erikson has now opted to become a revisionist Eriksonian should come as no great surprise. The tendency of innovators—especially in later life—to turn against their own innovations has frequently been noted; Erikson, in particular, has always shown a fear of being categorically defined once and for all, of being fixed in some unalterable prison of definition. Yet the extent to which he has lately chosen to revise his earlier views does come as something of a shock, for it is precisely the two constructs he was formerly most eager to celebrate—the psychic institution of identity and the modal American character—that he now seems most drastically bent on downgrading.

Although Erikson's ideas about identity always contained a certain measure of ambiguity—to the despair of more humble researchers attempting to “operationalize” and quantify them—one aspect of his theory seemed at least reasonably clear. Until recently, he saw the attainment of identity as an unequivocally positive achievement registering a vital—perhaps the single most vital—advance toward maturity on the part of the developing individual. Moreover, identity for Erikson was always inextricably bound up with the idea of man as a social being. Identity represented in his view the point at which the individual discovers some firm, trustworthy equivalence between his own history, talents, and ideals, and the embodiment of these elements within the social sector—some tenable correspondence, one might say, between the private self and the public life. For the individual achieving identity, the sense of community is no longer based on the immediate presence of parents or peers. He now gains a sense of fellowship with all those, living or dead, present in his actual life or only in his imagination, who have shared or contributed to the collective conception on which his identity is based.

It is just this achievement that Erikson has now come to mistrust, especially as it applies to that aspect of individual identity based on participation in the national community. Shared national identities may lead to a sense of common humanity among fellow nationals, Erikson now claims, but such intimacy is founded on the deliberate exclusion and degradation of aliens, and may therefore be destructive of that wider intimacy, that universal identity, which is now so desperately required. Thus, in his latest book, Dimensions of a New Identity,¹ Erikson stigmatizes shared national identities as collective myths which bring out not only the best but also the very worst in people. National identities, he now maintains, turn their adherents into members of what he calls “pseudo-species,” belligerent groups which can only maintain their own sense of uniqueness and humanity by dehumanizing others.

Although Erikson does not limit this particular human tendency to Americans, he does find it most vividly exemplified in the modal American character. American man is tragically flawed, tainted at the very outset of his history by the necessity for enacting a psychic drama in which his own spiritual survival depended on the oppression of others:

Man always needs somebody who is below him, who will be kept in place, and on whom can be projected all that is felt to be weak, low, and dangerous in oneself. If Americans had not had the Indians and the blacks—who, far from having conquered their land could not defend it, or who, far from having wanted to come here had been forced to—the new Americans would have had to invent somebody else in their place.

Having started badly, Americans are now seen by Erikson to be maintaining this destructive relationship to weaker peoples, as well as to their own inner “weaknesses”:

I think that recent developments in our national life such as the sudden shift of attention from military atrocity in foreign lands to political scandal at home, and then the dramatic public display of individuals responsible for or caught in such scandal, should leave no doubt about the psychological relationships I have only been able to sketch here: namely, that between the repression of inner conflict in those who overadjust to power, the suppression of adversary opinions, and the ready oppression of foreign people.

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These ideas are in the sharpest possible contrast to Erikson's views about America of no more than a decade ago. In “Reflections on the American Identity” (a chapter in the 1963 revision of Childhood and Society, his seminal work), he held up the American character, with its acceptance of diverse ethnic strains and its emphasis on a new beginning—the “new man” beginning life anew on a new continent—as a possible starting-point for the creation of a more inclusive pan-human identity. In that paper, he was highly sympathetic to a number of American institutions, particularly the American family and the character that it typically produced:

It [the American family] breeds, on the whole, undogmatic people, ready to drive a bargain and then to compromise. It makes complete irresponsibility impossible, and it makes open hate and warfare in families rare. It also makes it quite impossible for the American adolescent to become what his brothers and sisters in other large countries become so easily, uncompromising ideologists.

Indeed, Erikson was then so positively disposed to American institutions that he even had kind words for the military establishment and the American fighting man:

It is true that where the “psychoneurotic” American soldier felt inadequately prepared for life, he often implicitly and more often unconsciously blamed his mother; and that the expert felt compelled to agree with him. But it is also true that the road from main street to the foxhole was no longer—geographically, culturally, psychologically—than was the road to the front lines from the towns of nations which were open to attack and had been attacked, or which had prepared themselves to attack other people's homelands and now feared for their own. It seems senseless to blame the American family for the failures, but to deny it credit for the gigantic human achievement of overcoming that distance.

Nor, in those days, did Erikson see Americans as a danger to “lesser breeds.” The American character had an arsenal of defense mechanisms, but they were not based on the quasi-paranoid strategy of projecting onto the alien outsider one's own inner “dirtiness” or corruption. Instead, according to Erikson, the American character relied on the more benign, less drastic defense mechanism known as “ego restriction”—which deals with potentially troubling inner and outer experience by simply avoiding it. In marked contrast to projective defenses, which personalize the world in terms of good and evil, weak and strong, black and white, the ego restriction that Erikson first imputed to Americans leads rather to fixation on the impersonal and neutral features of the world. If it involves dehumanization of others at all, it does so by default, rather than by design; and since this form of psychological defense does not lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, it has far less malignant social consequences than does projection.

In Erikson's prior view, the American male relied on ego restriction not in order to maintain himself and his fellows as a belligerent pseudo-species, but rather because such unconscious self-limitation was a reasonable adaptation to the tenuous, shifting, and open qualities that characterize American life in all spheres. Just as his early family life had taught the young American not to value anything too deeply, since he would have to be ready to concede possessions, to strike bargains and achieve compromises among the democratic siblings, so his political party, an extension of his family arrangement, taught him to eschew rigid ideologies and passionate convictions, again in the interest of bargains and accommodations among democratic equals; and his work settings taught him to remain tentative, relatively uncommitted, ever ready to make the big move, to initiate the new beginnings that are the hallmark of “self-made men.”

Far from conceiving of the American character as a major threat to small minorities and to the possibility of some more-inclusive human identity, Erikson was then more worried about its own weaknesses in the face of external coercion. He was particularly concerned with the effects of ego restriction that rendered essentially decent Americans vulnerable to manipulation by hungrier, more passionate “boss” types. In statements which to a remarkable degree predict Watergate, Erikson in 1963 warned against the likely emergence of a new and very special kind of autocrat on the American scene, adept at exploiting the special characteristics of democratic society for his own ends:

“Bosses” are self-made autocrats and, therefore, consider themselves and one another the crown of democracy. As far as is necessary, a “boss” stays within the law, and as far as is possible he enters boldly into the vacuum left by the emancipated sons in their endeavor to restrict themselves in fairness to others. He looks for areas where the law has been deliberately uncharted . . . and tries to use it and abuse it for his own purposes.

In Erikson's present view, America is not only dominated by these “bosses,” but it has itself become the boss of the rest of the world. Erikson now sees America as an unscrupulous and autocratic force that has been loosed upon the world, threatening the fragile decencies of those minorities who have not yet adopted the machine as their totem, and destroying the possibility of that pan-human identity which is humanity's only salvation. Now small peoples—whether American blacks or North Vietnamese—arm themselves with desperate dignity to fight America. As Erikson said to the Black Panther leader Huey Newton in their 1971 conversations:

It should be clear that what happened here on the frontier of the Oakland ghetto has its counterpart in the various theaters of war abroad, particularly in Vietnam, where superbly armed and uniformed technicians were again sent to the frontier by a society that wished to preserve the outer borders of an industrial empire. There, too, they have found themselves infuriatingly ineffective against what would seem to be an infiltrating lumpen proletariat.

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By 1972, when he delivered his Godkin Lecure, “Play, Vision, and Deception,” whatever distinction Erikson had previously drawn between the ordinary “good” American and his more vicious manipulators had virtually disappeared, swept away in the tide of almost religious fervor which has marked many of his recent pronouncements on the American character. Indeed, Erikson has begun to sound less like a psychologist lately than like a theologian, as he readily invokes the themes of sin and redemption in his admonitions to America:

. . . this country must come to grips with its own awareness of historical guilt, over having transgressed against humanity and nature. . . . Liberation can come only from insights into the relevance of past guilt and into the place of ethical choice in the reformation of identity.

Or again:

Many Americans have been so convinced of the goodness of mechanical efficiency and the objectivity and moral neutrality of [him] who wields it, that we were naively surprised to find that not only brutalized Germans but also nice efficient Americans can participate in the mechanical destruction of lands and people by airborne war machines, even as World War II saw American saturation bombing. Since Hiroshima we have awakened only slowly to the fact that we have been chosen to contribute to the most modern version of what Loren Eiseley calls the lethal element in the universe by having decided to use atomic weapons first.

Yet even while Erikson calls on Americans to repent, he does not seem to believe any longer that there is any real possibility for change in the dominant American character, which now stands revealed in all those limitations and contradictions which have made it a reactionary, even a lethal element on the world stage. The only hope for rebirth and renewal lies within those hitherto dispossessed American constituencies—blacks, women, alienated youth—who have either rebelled against, or been excluded from, the dominant white American way of life, and hence are not trapped in its contradictions or wedded to its desperate and destructive solutions. Most especially does he rely on the young, whom he sees as the one real possibility for the moral regeneration of America:

Moralistic horror [about American atrocities] alone does not help. America has stepped into the center of the existential dilemma which empires have successively faced throughout historical time. Let us not delude ourselves in self-hate either; much of the rest of the world, and especially our erstwhile national enemies, are eagerly accepting our technological and commercial ideals, even as their radical youth has joined ours in a desperation and a rebellion which can only be understood as an attempt to enforce a new and all-human identity.

In short, in the early 60's Erikson saw the modal American as a decent and fundamentally reasonable individual, though one perhaps overly vulnerable to control by other, more aggressive types. Today he sees him as a dangerous and primitive psychological type, externalizing his rage and frustrations through sadistic forays against outsiders who represent metaphors of his own impotence. Which of these two versions is the correct one? Can American life and particularly the American character possibly have changed so drastically in so short a time?

Erikson would doubtless argue that since the time Childhood and Society was last revised, the Vietnam war revealed a new capacity for destructiveness in the American people—a talent and even zest for the “mechanical destruction of lands and peoples” that had formerly been hidden. Perhaps in fact it did. But had not foreign cities also been frightfully devastated twenty-five years earlier in World War II? Had not Erikson, long after the returns were in on such events as the saturation bombing of German cities and the fire and atomic bombing of Japanese cities, still found much to praise within the American character, even admiring the adaptability of the American soldier in adjusting so readily to the transition between the main streets of America and the battlefields of foreign lands? How then did the decent fighting man of World War II become transformed into the psychopath who fought the Vietnam war?

No answer to these questions can be constructed on the basis of Erikson's new model of the American character. Nor does this model fit the facts of American group behavior today. For example, since American society is at the moment facing a host of troubles, one might expect, in the light of Erikson's current theories, to find Americans engaging in a veritable orgy of collective paranoia, looking for scapegoats on whom to blame their current problems: military defeat, nuclear threat, inflation, recession, political disarray, etc. Yet little of the kind seems to be taking place. There had been speculation that when the agony of the Vietnam war was finally over, a bitter reaction would set in against those viewed as being responsible for our national humiliation—the Jews, so prominent in the peace movement, seemed as likely a target as any for such recriminations. Yet in fact no significant stab-in-the-back theory ever materialized. Americans in the aftermath of Vietnam seem noticeably disinclined to seek out culprits on whom to blame our defeat in Vietnam. The chief conclusion they seem to have drawn from the Vietnam war is the eminently sane one that we should avoid such useless and costly morasses in the future. Erikson has claimed that the treatment of draft evaders and deserters is actually a hidden form of scapegoatism, a way of excluding from the national life those who “one way or another bear the brunt of our conflicts,” and a way “to avoid facing either those sinister impulses or those high ideals which led them to deviate.” His case would be stronger, however, if the punitive legislation affecting these cases had not already been on the books since 1940—enacted and vigorously enforced long before the Vietnam draft evasions and desertions had begun—and drafted, moreover, in its original version by anti-fascist liberals who helped both to write and to implement it.

Again, during the recent gasoline shortages, one might have expected (considering the famous American love for machines that Erikson finds so ominous) to see Americans looking high and low for a culprit on whom to blame their vehicular castration—and indeed, many Jews had feared, especially given the massive propaganda efforts by Arab and oil-company lobbies, that Israel would conveniently fill that slot in the American demonology. But as it turned out, only an insignificant fraction of the population blamed Israel for their gasless Sundays. The majority was more apt to harbor the realistic opinion that nature, the Arab oil embargo, the large oil companies, and the American government all contributed to the gasoline shortage.

Watergate is yet another example of the inaccuracy of Erikson's model. If Americans rely so heavily on what are clinically called techniques of defensive projection, they should have sympathized en masse with Nixon's constant portrayal of himself as an innocent party victimized by the sinister manipulation of others. But by and large they do not seem to have done so. In fact, every public display of self-pity on Nixon's part seems to have led to a further drop in the President's credibility. (Of course Erikson could claim that the President became the “scapegoat” for the general corruption, but one doubts somehow that he will.)

Indeed, the whole question of Nixon vis à vis Erikson's derogatory theory of the American character is an interesting one. While Erikson would probably say that Nixon's landslide 1972 election simply confirms his present theory of the American character—Americans gave the largest majority in their history to a devious, scapegoating, and rather paranoid man—the Nixon landslide could just as well be seen as a refutation of the new Eriksonian model. After all, Nixon's victory was largely based on his record in foreign policy. Would a nation whose psyche was peopled with sinister fantasies of otherness have so eagerly embraced the architect of the opening to China or the overtures toward the Soviet Union?

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Erikson's revised theory of the American character does not, then, seem to predict American behavior accurately, nor does it account for what actually goes on in American life. On the contrary, it is his earlier analysis of American society which has been proving accurate with the passage of time. Thus, it is strange to hear his apocalyptic pronouncements about the predetermined “racism” and “sexism” of the American character just when the country's social institutions are engaged in a strenuous effort to accommodate the clamor for representation of a whole range of previously excluded groups. The process may be happening too slowly to please the most militant, but it has already reached a point where representatives of some groups that Erikson has designated the “victims” of American society managed, if only temporarily, to capture control of the nominating machinery of one of America's two major political parties.

The truth is that while the modal American may tend at first to block out of consciousness those groups he perceives as alien or outcast, he will, even if grudgingly, reacknowledge them once their outcast status has been altered by some gesture of self-affirmation. American blacks, for instance, began to be accepted precisely at the moment when they began to cast off their ancient definition as victims and began to frighten the white majority. Similarly, the creation of the “new Israeli Jew,” who refuted the traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Jew as passive and cowardly, contributed greatly to the acceptance of American Jews. All out-groups enter the American mainstream via this same process. Once having repudiated a discredited past identity, they are then free to assert a claim to equality of treatment with all other Americans and to enter a bid for the political influence that is the surest way to establish this claim. With the acquisition of such influence, the previously excluded group is entitled to vie for its rights along with all other groups, taking part in that archetypically American hurly-burly process of bargain, compromise, and accommodation to new realities which Erikson once described so accurately.

This pattern has shaped the experience of almost every immigrant group in American history, and has enabled Americans to tolerate an ethnic diversity that would have torn most nations apart. And it is operating now with respect to the latest wave of “immigrants” into the domain of majority attention—blacks, women, even gays, the self-styled “Third World” constituency—just as it has for the immigrant groups of the American past. In other words, that openness to change which Erikson once saw as a central American characteristic seems to be in effect now no less—and perhaps even more—than it ever was.

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Just as his earlier view of the strengths of the American character is proving accurate, so is his earlier view of its weaknesses. The more it reveals itself in new forms and expressions, the more does the modal American character exhibit the weaknesses indigenous to that very “ego-restrictive” type which Erikson originally diagnosed. Instead of looking for some leader to love or for some inferior to hate, Americans continue to seek for impersonal solutions to personal problems. In order to avoid awareness of inner divisions and anxieties, they turn their attention outward to mechanics, to nature, and to concrete actions: they drive their cars and their snowmobiles, they putter and tinker, they become sexual athletes with relatively anonymous partners, they hunt and fish, or they go to the moon. In the more passive but still impersonal mode, they nurse at the electronic breast, and they watch other men's impersonal athletics, or their equally impersonal violence. They are as likely to get emotional comfort from food as from people; and when things get really bad internally, they pour alcohol, an impersonal metaphor of virility, down their throats.

The irony is that the youthful radicals to whom Erikson looks for redemption seem to embody these very weaknesses of the modal American character rather than its strengths. They talk a lot about intimacy, but their major supports come either from impersonal sources, or from pseudo-intimate relationships with easily replaceable group members. They claim to eschew materialism, but they look for their pleasures and their remedy in the impersonal bounty of chemicals, food, wine, anonymous sex, and electronically amplified noise. Their leaders are apt to be instant gurus who advise them to achieve grace by dissolving their ego boundaries and merging with the infinite—that is, through losing rather than accentuating their identity or personhood. That inclusive, pan-human identity which Erikson awaits from the new youth sounds like wishful thinking: if anything, they seem to reject the very idea of coherent identities, since these put too much limitation on future choice, on some alleged future possibility for change and renewal. They insist on their right to be saints and psychopaths, yogis and commissars, men and women, and all at once. They are still the self-made and eternally re-made Americans, forever insisting on the right to rebirth and a clean slate. Their real goal would seem to be not identity (which implies choice and commitment) but its opposite—identity diffusion—that state in which one keeps symbolic title to all options by prolonging indefinitely the decision to adopt one or the other.

Like the new youth, Erikson too finds it hard to surrender title to all possible options: “When I was asked to give an account of the ways that my ideas have developed from my life,” he has told Robert Coles,

I thought that the concept of the boundary might be the fitting symbol for the whole of my personal and social development. At almost every point, I have had to stand between alternatives, to be completely at home in neither, and to take no definitive stand against either. Since thinking presupposes receptiveness, this position is fruitful for thought; but difficult in life, which demands decision, and the exclusion of alternatives.

Erikson's mistrust of boundaries is shared by the new youth which is devoted to eliminating them through drugs, group-grope, unisex. Thus Erikson—who was once the chief spokesman for ego identity—could become just another trendy sponsor and legitimator of identity diffusion.

But Erikson's identification with the new youth is based no less on shared politics than on shared personality traits. The revisions in his thinking have clearly proceeded along lines set down in the standard radical critique of American mores and institutions which holds that the structures and practices of American capitalist society destroy the possibilities for true community by fostering competition among individuals, classes, and races, which leads in turn to the domination by a white male elite over the “lower” orders. Erikson has not only accepted this idea; he has extended it beyond American social institutions to include the internal politics of the American character itself.

Erikson's politics and his reasons for adopting them are his own business; but it appears that in order to meet the demands of his political position he has done violence to some of his most important conceptions and insights. As a psychologist who up to now has identified with Erikson's theoretical position, I deplore this seeming politicization of his thought, and the consequent reduction in his stature as an independent and creative thinker.

¹ Norton, 125 pp., $5.95.