Abstract

Erikson is Professor of Human Development at Harvard, a psychoanalyst, and the author of the widely influential books, Young Man Luther, and Childhood and Society. What is the relevance of his latest book to philosophy? One answer is that Erikson deals with several concepts of personal identity which philosophers will recognize as corresponding to historical philosophic positions. He does not choose between these disparate views, but correlates them, treating each as partial, and learning about his complex subject from the habits of syntax appropriate to each. Erikson divides personal identity into the "I," the "selves," and the "ego," on the grounds that these terms provide a way to distinguish roles and "counterplayers" of various functionings of human personality. We need these various terms to designate identity as viewed from without and from within. Erikson's "selves" are what the "I" reflects on when it views the body, the personality, or the social roles to which it is attached. The counterplayers of the "selves" are the "others" of Existentialism. Erikson's reflective "I," like the subject of Descartes' cogito, is "the center of awareness in a universe of experience in which I have a coherent identity... am in possession of my wits and able to say what I see and think." With Descartes, Erikson finds the unique counterplayer to the "I" in the Deity; the repository of the vitality which is being affirmed of itself in each awareness of the "I." Erikson's "ego" corresponds to the Self of Hume's Treatise, undiscoverable beneath its particular perceptions. The "ego" is necessarily unconscious; we are aware of its work but never of it. As of Hume's self, we can say of it that it has the task of turning passive into active, screening and organizing the impositions of the internal and external environment in such a way that they bring about volitions. Like Hume, Erikson feels philosophers and psychologists have "created nouns such as the 'I' or the 'self', making imaginary entities out of a manner of speaking" and that we would be mistaken to give ontological status to these particles. Perhaps Erikson would accept a statement of the contemporary philosophical form: "The several designations of 'selves', etc., are instrumental in explaining complex personal identity feelings or events." In other parts of the book Erikson uses William James as an example of creative identity, discusses the concept of "negative identity", and in the last three chapters discusses aspects of personal identity in the disequilibrium of the young, the races, and women. The book contains Erikson's writings on identity over a twenty-year period. However, in areas of common interest to psychoanalytic theory and philosophy, the requirements of Erikson's clinical work have suggested relationships between concepts different from the relationships often assumed by philosophers. Thus, on personal identity, criteria of ideological soundness of a society, and the determinants of empirical perception, the addition of Erikson's insights may give the philosopher a multidimensional glimpse of the field wherein he labors.--M. B. M.