Wallerstein was said that no psychoanalyst had contributed with his knowledge to the twentieth century the way Erik Erikson did. Of course there have been a lot of psychoanalysts in time, but they haven’t reshaped psychoanalysis the way he did. Erikson tried to make changes in psychoanalysis without making any discrimination between earlier psychoanalytic thinking and himself. He never broke the link between himself and Freud, although some students at Harvard thought that Freud’s teachings were pessimistic, he backed him up and tried to show that Freud’s teachings were never pessimistic.
Erikson had a complicated way of thinking; he had his own thoughts about psychoanalysis. When Erich Fromm published a book called “Escape From Freedom”, he became a big concern to other psychoanalysts for damaging the purity of psychoanalysis and Fromm started working independently on his own. Erikson was concerned the same thing might have happened to him with what he had in mind for psychoanalysis.
It is very important to preserve Erikson’s legacy. He tried to open the doors of psychoanalysis to social scientists too, because he thought that psychoanalysis did not give meaning to those people who were not clinicians. But he believed that these social scientists were also very important for the future of psychoanalysis. When Erikson wrote about legendary freedom fighters like Martin Luther and Gandhi, he was trying to show to his follow psychoanalysts that the way these historians succeeded in solving problems was just what was needed in psychoanalysis.
References
Wallerstein, R., S. & Goldberger, L. (2000). Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson.Psychoanalytic Psychology, 17, 2:437-442. doi: 10.1037//0736-9735.n.2.437
Makaleyi özetleyen: Thokozani K.M.Mbewe
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