Mother, Melancholia, and Humor in Erik H. Erikson’s Earliest Writings

Freud uses this phase in a brief essay published in 1908 (Freud 1963d). He notes that the primary motivation behind a “family romance” is to free oneself, as one grows up, from parental authority. A child who is both neurotic and highly gifted will employ his imagination in “getting free from the parents of whom he now has such a low opinion and of replacing them by others, occupying, as a rule, a higher social station” (p. 43). Chance encounters with a person of a higher station, which arouse the child’s envy, produce the fantasy in which both parents are replaced by others of better birth. Although the family romance is typically the work of young children, it is not uncommon for it to persist far beyond puberty. Freud also notes that a child may create a fantasy that places the child in a more privileged position in relation to one’s siblings, and may also eliminate a forbidden degree of kinship with a sister if he is sexually attracted to her. In Identity and the Life Cycle (1959), Erikson mentions his own case of a high-school girl of Middle-European descent who created a Scottish identity for herself. He notes that the bit of reality on which it was based was her attachment, in early childhood, to a neighbor woman who was from the British Isles. When he asked her how she had managed to marshal all the details of Scottish life to make her story credible, she responded in a Scottish brogue, “Bless you, sir, I needed a past” (p. 141).

Why Erikson abandoned a career in art was ostensibly due to the fact that he had difficulty painting in color when he tried to move beyond woodcuts and black and white drawings. He referred to this inability as an “inhibition,” however, and noted that his stepfather wanted him to become a pediatrician like himself. The implication is that he felt guilty for wanting to become an artist instead of honoring his stepfather’s wishes, and that this sense of guilt caused his artistic inhibition (see Friedman 1999, pp. 46–57).

Erikson’s use of the phrase “sexual enlightenment” is noteworthy because “The Sexual Enlightenment of Children” is the title of an open letter that Freud wrote to the editor of Soziale Medizon und Hygiene in 1907 (see Freud 1963c).

Erikson’s reference to ancient tales that combine “the uncanny and the familiar” is a direct allusion to Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny’” (1958b; originally published in 1919), in which Freud argues that the very reason something appears “uncanny” or strange is that it was originally experienced as “familiar.” He notes in this regard the tendency of some male patients to feel that there is something uncanny about the female genital organs, and suggests that they are uncanny because they are reminiscent of one’s original home in one’s mother’s own body, from which one is now estranged.

As Freud points out in the concluding paragraph of his 1913 essay, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” a psychoanalytic interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Lear: “One might say that the three inevitable relations man has with woman are here represented: that with the mother who bears him, with the companion of his bed and board, and with the destroyer. Or is it the three forms taken on by the figure of the mother as life proceeds: the mother herself, the beloved who is chosen after her pattern, and finally the Mother Earth who receives him again? But it is in vain that the old man years after the love of woman as once he had it from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent goddess of Death, will take him into her arms” (Freud 1958a, p. 75).

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Sabastian Smee (2007) mentions that the painter, Lucien Freud, and his grandfather, Sigmund Freud, “liked Max and Moritz, the antic, prank-filled comic strip by Wilhelm Busch that dated back to Sigmund’s childhood” (p. 9). In later years, Lucien “always claimed not to have read much of his grandfather’s work, and yet he speaks of him with fondness and a certain protectiveness. ‘You know how laughter often seals your memory of someone?’ he said. ‘He made me laugh a lot’” (p. 9).

Quite possibly, this is not a misreading of Freud but the expression of a different viewpoint, i.e., that it is not the superego (or internalized parental function) that comforts the ego, but the ego that stands up to the superego and, in a sense, comforts it. In a footnote, Erikson suggests that fairy tales “appeal, with their reconciling strength, to all human beings, not just children, and they possess the magically solid form that has always been the brighter condition for a comforting touch on the stern superego” (p. 37). Erikson may be suggesting that humor has a similar effect on the stern superego. In any event, Freud’s idea that the superego has a genial side, and that humor is perhaps the best illustration of this fact, is quite revolutionary, and has yet to be fully recognized as such by his successors.