Erikson on development in adulthood : new insights from the unpublished papers

301 Pages·2002·1.59 MB·English

by  Hoare

Erikson on Development
in Adulthood:
New Insights from the
Unpublished Papers
Carol Hren Hoare
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Erikson on Development in Adulthood
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Erikson on Development
in Adulthood
New Insights from the Unpublished Papers
Carol Hren Hoare
1
2002
3
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoare, Carol Hren
Erikson on development in adulthood : new insights from the unpublished papers /
Carol Hren Hoare.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-513175-4
1. Adulthood—Psychological aspects. 2. Erikson, Erik H. (Erik Homburger), 1902–1994
I. Title.
BF724.5 .H59 2002
155.6—dc21 2001021918
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Ray
Étude in E
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Preface
A preface permits an author to tell readers what it was that he or she had in
mind from the very beginning of a book’s fledgling design, the methods that
led to content selection, and, perhaps, the interest that drove the book to
completion.
This book began more than 12 years ago when I first visited Houghton
Library at Harvard University. I wished to gain a more complete under-
standing of Erikson’s concepts about the adult and of how he found adults
to develop and change when, in fact, they do so. That first visit to the Erik-
son papers left me feeling surprised, deflated, and perplexed. Fully expecting
to find little more than I had read in his 120 publications, I encountered a di-
rectory that listed in excess of 2,000 “items,” each item containing as many
as 36 file folders of material. I recall an immediate sense of the impossibility
of finding my way through that great bulk of papers.
About to abandon the project, I came across a transcript of the Conference
on the Adult, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a
manuscript proceedings that is replete with Erikson’s notes, marginalia, ex-
clamations, circlings, and question marks. His thoughtful reflections were
magnetic and rather amazing to me at the time. Here was a great psychoana-
lyst asking over and over again what it means to be an adult and why it is that
so many adults seem to settle for a restricted version of what they might yet
become, whereas others always seem to create resilient, fresh renditions of
themselves throughout the adult years, in effect refusing to endure halted de-
velopment and its stagnation. But Erikson baffled me. Why did he question
what it means to be an adult when he had first asked that question as early as
1942? Surely, in ways far beyond his adult stage permutations, he had told us
what adults are like. But if I had hoped for some instant synthesis of his con-
cepts, I was disappointed. In fact, it is only in sweeping through the great
breadth of his published and unpublished thought that key concepts about the
adult, what Erikson sometimes called adult “images,” emerge. And it is only
in placing his stage views aside that those images can come forward.
viii Preface
That began my quest, one that later took me to the Erikson Institute in
Chicago, to the Princeton University audiotapes of Erikson’s Gauss Seminars
in Criticism, and to the Library of Congress Papers of Margaret Mead. I re-
turned time and again to the Erikson Papers at Houghton Library to extend
my reading, an inch at a time, through his musings, notes, annotated off-
prints, and letters. I interviewed persons who had known the theorist and
could lend access to him as a person, and I had planned to initiate many
more of these fascinating conversations. But after 12 interviews about him, I
was ready to move forward. Erikson’s thinking, after all, had to come from
him. The late Joan Erikson, Erikson’s widow, helped to put me back on
track with her keen humor: “If you don’t stop going around talking to peo-
ple about Erik,” she said, “this book is going to come out of your ears in-
stead of your pen!”
To create boundaries for the study, I eventually confined myself to the
rich composition section of the Erikson Papers at Houghton Library, to re-
lated letters found there and in the Mead Papers, to early drafts of Young
Man LutherandIdentity: Youth and Crisisheld by the Erikson Institute, to
the Princeton audiotapes of the Erikson seminar series, and to Erikson’s pub-
lished writings. The Papers at Houghton Library were a primary source, for
those 268 items house Erikson’s candid thoughts and reflections, ideas that
would later become rather constricted by the processes of formalized writ-
ing, of polishing and editing for publication.
Erikson’s six renditions, or “images,” of the adult are the nucleus of this
book. Through a process that was defined by Glaser and Strauss as “grounded
theory,”1 these renditions emerged from the data in Erikson’s papers. This
was a process of unearthing, examining, and clustering his various ideas into
content categories, an inductive process in which the six forms of adult arose
naturalistically from Erikson’s writings. Two chapters that had once seemed
likely to emerge failed to meet the test of substance and fell by the wayside.
Approximately halfway through the project, I had anticipated that there
would be one chapter on the gender-polarized adult and another on the sens-
ing adult. Indeed, Erikson wrote about the way we live out our adult years
captured by one or another gender, by gender roles, and by historically chang-
ing ideas about those roles. He spoke to the way each adult is somehow bifur-
cated because he or she cannot possibly exist in the other gender’s skin, voice,
perspective, and biases. In the end, Erikson did not elaborate or conceptualize
fully enough to permit a chapter on those thoughts. His nascent ideas had not
scaffolded into fully formed concepts.
The chapter on the sensing adult was to have considered Erikson’s view
of the now-grown person who uses and trusts only a small portion of the
sensory apparatus that had once been so essential to childhood perceptions
and learning. We are hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, and touching adults,
as well as limbic and rational beings. But Erikson held that we discredit
much of the sensory information that comes to us as we continually discover
and learn about adult life and its bounds. In the end, Erikson had said too
Preface ix
little about these instinctual guidance systems. Here, too, his written and
spoken words on the topic were in too early a stage of development. His
thoughts are both tentative in nature and slim in substance.
That this project took more than a decade to complete, interrupted, of
course, by teaching responsibilities, seems a rather long a period of time for
one book. However, it was important to me to understand both Erikson and
his thought. To do this, I had to follow Robert Coles’s advice and read the
thinkers Erikson had read.2 In the end, immersion in Kierkegaard, Freud,
Lao-Tse, Schopenhauer, St. Augustine, Angelus Silesius, Nietzsche, Goethe,
Oswald Spengler, and New Testament verses led me to see the philosopher
and spiritual thinker in Erikson. It helped me to place Erikson as a conceptu-
alizer whose thoughts did not completely emigrate from Europe to an
identity-struggling United States. The entire journey through Erikson’s writ-
ings and through those of his conceptual ancestors was one of the very best
learning experiences of my adult life. I can only hope that the master, Erik
Erikson himself, somehow knows this.