Erik H. Erikson

Identity: Youth and Crisis

(New-York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1994)

Identity: Youth and Crisis collects Erik H. Erikson’s major essays on topics originating in the concept of the adolescent identity crisis. Identity, Erikson writes, is as unfathomable as it is all-pervasive. It deals with a process that is located both in the core of the individual and in the core of the communal culture. As the culture changes, new kinds of identity questions arise – Erikson comments, for example, on issues of social protest and changing gender roles that were particular to the 1960s.

Representing two decades of groundbreaking work, the essays are not so much a systematic formulation of theory as an evolving report that is both clinical and theoretical. The subjects range from “creative confusion” in the two famous lives – the dramatist George Bernard Shaw and the philosopher William James – to the connection between individual struggles and social order. “Race and the Wider Identity” and the controversial “Womanhood and the Inner Space” are included in the collection.

Erik H. Erikson

Childhood and Socitey

(New-York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1993)

The original and vastly influential ideas of Erik H. Erikson underlie much of our understanding of human development. His insights into the interdependence of the individual’s growth and historical change, his now-famous concepts of identity, growth, and the life cycle, have changed the way we perceive ourselves and society. Widely read and cited, his works have won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book award.

Combining the insights of clinical psychoanalysis with a new approach to cultural anthropology, Childhood and Society deals with the relationships between childhood training and cultural accomplishment, analyzing the infantile and the mature, the modern and the archaic elements in human motivation. It was hailed upon its first publication as a “rare and living combination of European and American thought in the human sciences” (Margaret Mead, The American Scholar).