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Browsing by Author "Friedman, Lawrence J."

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  • Erik Erikson on Negative Identity & Pseudospeciation : Extended and Particularized by Ta-Nehisi Coates
    Publication . Friedman, Lawrence J.; Medeiros, Pilar Damião
    One can feel challenged in this chilling time when sundry variations of ultra-nationalism have become quite discernable in the USA, Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. They have often taken the form of a rhetoric of fear and hatred toward “undesirables.” In this time of trouble in an increasingly nuclearized world, it is well to turn to Erik Erikson. His related concepts of “negative identity” and “pseudospeciation” need to be addressed more fully than they have in recent decades. Much is to be gained by both academic discussion and public debate over these two Erikson concepts. They signal elements in his “Way of Looking at Things.” More immediately, they help us address the crude and dangerous ultra-nationalisms of our time. Sensitive to the intimate relationship between the inner self and the outer social circumstances, Erikson, began in the mid and late 1940s to shape his most central concept - identity formation. It is well to refresh ourselves on the qualities he assigned to identity, for without that recall, one can hardly come to grips with his concepts of “universal Specieshood” and “pseudospeciation”, both of which emerged from it. In Childhood and Society [1], perhaps his most innovative book, Erikson displayed a marked cross-cultural perspective, comparing psychological development in several countries and cultures. While “officially” pledging fealty to Freudian psychoanalysis, Erikson was more attentive than Freud had been to ways the social circumstances of a society impacted the inner psyches of its members. Most importantly, Childhood and Society introduced the concept of an eight-stage human life cycle that was anchored in a struggle to garner and sustain personal identity. There is profit in recognizing here that Erikson’s concept of identity was initially formulated more than three decades before in his still unpublished “Manuscript von Erik.” It is the story of his Wanderschaft amidst a troubled adolescence. Identity was characterized in this narrative as a personal sense of sameness and historical continuity through which life seemed to cohere1. The “Manuscript” captured young Erik’s thoughts and tensions at the time. Identity was cast within what later came to be called the stages of the human life cycle. Indeed, it became central to these stages. The life cycle involved a person moving toward and sustaining a viable sense of identity. Long before he had even heard of Freud, the “Manuscript von Erik” essentially represented the beginning of an intellectual process that left us with Childhood and Society. The initial “Manuscript” centered on a tension between one’s inner subconscious drives and the needs of society, and this became the essence of his premier book. It is no service to scholarship that “Manuscript von Erik” has never been published and made readily available to scholars. Each of the eight stages in Erikson’s delineation of the human life cycle is to be construed as a polarity-a positive and hopeful disposition counterpointed by a pole that reduced the vibrancy of everyday existence. The first stage underscored the pole of trust that (hopefully) overshadowed the opposite pole mistrust [2]. The next stage, infancy, featured the polarity of autonomy on the one hand and shame on the other. There followed “initiative” vs. “guilt”, “industry over a sense of inferiority, the all-important quality of “identity” over “role diffusion” during adolescence, “intimacy” rather than “isolation” in young adulthood, “generativity” over “self-absorption” during midlife, and finally a sense of “integrity” over “despair” in old age. [Introduction]
    2019-03Journal article Open access Show more