0.11 Erik erikson  (Page 8/26)

Discussion Question: Have you ever watched children play? What has it told you about the individual child, and is it always consistent with who you think that child is? What sort of games or sports do you like to play, and do you like to play with children?

The Value of Cross-Cultural Studies

The value of studying other cultures was summarized rather succinctly by Erikson in an interview with Richard Evans:

The interesting thing was that all the childhood problems which we had begun to take seriously on the basis of pathological developments in our own culture, the Indians talked about spontaneously and most seriously without any prodding. They referred to our stages as the decisive steps in the making of a good Sioux Indian or a good Yurok Indian…And “good” meant whatever seemed “virtuous” in a “strong” man or woman in that culture. I think this contributed eventually to my imagery of basic human strengths. (pg. 62; Erikson cited in Evans, 1964)

So, it was actually on the basis of cross-cultural comparisons that Erikson felt confident in proposing his eight stage theory of psychosocial development.

Erikson was deeply indebted to two anthropologists, H. Scudder Mekeel and Alfred Kroeber, who introduced him to the Sioux and Yurok tribes they had been studying. Through their introductions, Erikson was able to gain the confidence of the individual Sioux and Yurok who provided Erikson with invaluable evidence on their traditional ways of life and their child-rearing practices. But it is important to note that Native Americans were not the only other cultural groups that Erikson studied. He studied the childhood myths of Hitler and the Bolshevik myth of Maxim Gorky’s youth, in an attempt to understand the terrible political events that occurred in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. He also examined the factors influencing Black identity in America. He suggested that one of the greatest struggles for Blacks in this country, after the Civil War had ended slavery, was the mostly false promise of a better life in the North. As they left behind their successful identity as slaves (Note: successful only means that it was a clear identity, not that it was moral or justified) for a fragmented identity of supposedly free people, though prejudice and discrimination were still rampant, even in the North. Erikson made some interesting comparisons between Blacks and Native Americans in terms of their attempts to identify their place in American society:

I have mentioned the fact that mixed-blood Indians in areas where they hardly ever see Negroes refer to their full-blood brothers as “niggers,” thus indicating the power of the national imagery which serves to contrast the dominant ideal images and the dominant evil images in the inventory of available prototypes. No individual can escape this opposition of images which, in a great variety of syndromes, is all-pervasive in the men and in the women, in the majorities and in the minorities, and in all the classes of a given national or cultural unit. (pg. 215; Erikson, 1950)