The Verbal Portrait: Erik H. Erikson’s Contribution to Psychoanalytic Discourse

Friedman (1999) provides a detailed account of Erikson’s struggle following his completion of Gymnasium to become an artist and of the circumstances that brought him to Vienna and his association with the psychoanalytic community (pp. 42–74). He notes that what Erikson called Freud’s “enormous visual talents, his genius, for example, in interpreting dreams” helped him to resolve his initial ambivalence over psychoanalytic training (p. 72). As for why Erikson did not succeed as an artist, he cites Erikson’s own comment that he “never learned to paint with color,” adding that this “was where the inhibition was” (p. 47). Perhaps this very difficulty with color was another basis for embracing psychoanalysis for, as Charles A. Riley II points out in Color Codes (1995), one “may scour the works of Freud for any but the most offhand color references; even the monograph on Leonardo gives little notice of it”; and although “there is a brief paragraph on the importance of memory in the excitation of what he called the ‘psychical perceptual system of the visual organ’ during dreams” he “readily admits that his dreams are relatively impoverished in ‘sensory elements’ like color” (p. 303). On the other hand, Riley points out that an “exception to this was a dream in which he saw water of a deep blue, against which brown smoke rose from a ship’s funnels by the red and dark brown buildings onshore” (p. 303). The colors were those of his children’s toy blocks which he had seen the day before. The buildings they made of these blocks were linked with the recollection of a recent trip to Italy and associated with color impressions of Lake Isonzo’s beautiful blue tones and Lake Carso’s lagoons and brown tones. Riley notes: “For Freud the colors of the unconscious have a direct mimetic link to actual experience. The conclusion drawn from the unusual experience with a colorful dream is an apt précis of his low-keyed views on the subject: ‘The beauty of the colors in the dream was only a repetition of something seen in my memory’” (p. 303). For Riley, “This is a very literal-minded approach to color” (p. 303; Freud 1953, pp. 546–547). Perhaps so, but in light of Erikson’s decision to become a child analyst and use of children’s play constructions in place of dreams, he could very well have viewed this dream of Freud’s, together with his downplaying of the significance of the colors of the buildings, as affording a vital clue to how he himself might fashion his own career as a psychoanalyst.

Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) was a Swiss art historian and critic.

As Friedman (1999) points out, Erikson had planned a short essay on Luther as an epilogue to a series of essays on patients at Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he was a member of the clinical staff. Friedman suggests that his treatment of a young seminarian served as the springboard for the book as this case, which was later to become the focus of his lecture “The Nature of Clinical Evidence” (Erikson 1964b), had deepened his interest “in the psychology of religious experience and silenced his residual doubts that by treating religion seriously, he was being disloyal to Freud” (p. 267).

I discuss his memorial to Mary Sarvis, a social worker, in my article “Mother, Melancholia, and Art in Erik H. Erikson’s Toys and Reasons” (Capps 2007). I focus especially on his comment that “she translated her melancholy into a passionate wish to help others,” to make them “feel close and at home” and his concluding sentences in which he noted that when she said no she “said no affirmatively,” so “when she said no to herself, we know it was when she felt that the powers of affirmation were failing her or, for that matter, us. Now we can only hope that a power greater than she and we will give her peace in the company of the most humorous angels—and that He will let her help Him with the melancholy ones” (cited on p. 381; Erikson 1987, p. 731).

Erikson does not cite Emerson’s writings in his published writings but he makes a brief reference to him in his autobiographical essay (Erikson 1975). Commenting on his early relationship with his mother, he notes: “Even as I remember the mother of my early years as pervasively sad, I also visualize her as deeply involved in reading what I later found to have been such authors as Brandes, Kierkegaard, and Emerson, and I could never doubt that her ambitions for me transcended the conventions which she, nevertheless, faithfully served” (p. 31). As both Georg Morris Brandes (born Georg Morris Cohen) and Sören Kierkegaard were Danish and were therefore associated in his mind with his maternal Danish heritage, Emerson, in contrast, represented his adopted country. See in this connection his reference to Dvořák’s New World Symphony in his “Identity and Uprootedness in Our Time” (Erikson 1964a, pp. 83–84).

Erikson’s memorial to Ruth Benedict was presented in New York City on November 4, 1948, six weeks after her death (on September 17) and published in a memorial volume the following year. She was one of the pioneers of cultural anthropology and among the first to apply anthropology to advanced societies. Born in a farming town in the Shenango Valley in upper New York State on June 5, 1887, she attended Vassar College, later took courses at The New School for Social Research, received her doctorate at Columbia University and became a faculty member there in 1923. She was promoted to full professor just two months prior to her death. Her books included Patterns of Culture (1934) and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946).

Erikson’s half-sister Ellen and her husband immigrated to Israel in 1933 and arranged for their parents to move to Israel in 1935 (Friedman 1999, p. 142).

This sentence also replaces the sentence quoted above in the second edition of Childhood and Society (Erikson 1963, p. 267).

A small collection of her poems written in 1941 is included in An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959, pp, 473–490). Several are reflections on biblical themes, especially related to Mary and Jesus.

Benedict focused on the cultural patterns of the societies that she studied but she also emphasized how individuals, especially the disenfranchised, negotiated these patterns in their own lives: “Perhaps inspired by her own life experience, Benedict was fascinated by the choices that individuals made and by the interplay between individual goals/yearnings and the dictates of that person’s culture. The individual could try to follow the life path praised by his/her culture, even if it conflicted with their own inclinations. Or, they could seek to go against the norm, in varying degrees. Like [Franz] Boas [her mentor], she did not wholly buy into cultural determinism, and she believed that culture itself was the product of human choices.” From http://​www.​nndb.​com/​people/​786/​000097495/​

Erikson is referring here to Pedro Calderón, the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright and poet.