Concept
Psychohistory
The application of psychoanalytic understanding to history and to the lives of historical figures, reading individual development and collective events in the light of each other. Freud's study of Leonardo da Vinci was an early instance; Erikson's books on Luther and Gandhi gave the field its model and much of its method, and the name became current in the 1960s and 1970s.
Development
1958
developed by Erik Erikson
Young Man Luther (1958) and Gandhi's Truth (1969) set the pattern for psychohistory, reading a leader's personal crises together with the historical crises of their time.
In Erik Erikson: Faculty of Arts and Sciences Memorial Minute (2002);Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969);Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958)
Relations
- 1958 developed by Erik Erikson
Young Man Luther (1958) and Gandhi's Truth (1969) set the pattern for psychohistory, reading a leader's personal crises together with the historical crises of their time.
Works
- 1958
Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History
Erikson's study of the youth of Martin Luther, which its publisher presents as a psychobiography applying his ideas on human development and the identity crisis to the leading figure of the Protestant Reformation. It reads Luther's years of crisis in the monastery as a prolonged identity crisis and as a psychosocial moratorium, a period in which binding adult commitments are put off. It argues that the way Luther resolved this personal crisis became a turning point in the religious history of his age. By reading a leader's inner crisis together with the historical crisis of his time, the book became a founding work of psychohistory and psychobiography.
- 1969
Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence
A psychohistorical study of Mohandas Gandhi in middle life, centred on the textile strike at Ahmedabad in 1918. Erikson asks how Gandhi came to move the people of India both spiritually and politically, so that, in the publisher's words, he became the revolutionary innovator of militant nonviolence and India the motherland of large-scale civil disobedience. The book traces how Gandhi's generativity, the concern of middle life with what one establishes and guides for those who come after, and his method of nonviolent resistance grew out of his personal history and out of the historical situation of his time. With Young Man Luther it set the pattern of psychohistory. It received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1970.
- 2002
Erik Erikson: Faculty of Arts and Sciences Memorial Minute
The memorial minute on Erik H. Erikson (1902–1994) that Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences placed on its records at its meeting of 12 February 2002, printed in the Harvard Gazette on 7 March 2002 and submitted by Robert Coles, Richard M. Hunt and Brendan A. Maher (chair). It traces his life from his birth in Frankfurt in 1902 to a Danish Jewish mother, his first surname Homburger, and his art studies in Karlsruhe and Munich, to Vienna. There, from 1927, he taught at a small school Anna Freud ran for children of the Freudian circle, was analysed by her and trained as a child analyst. In 1933, once fully admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, he gave up the medical studies he had begun and emigrated with his family to the United States. The minute then follows his American posts: a psychoanalytic practice in Cambridge with appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Judge Baker Clinic and the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and graduate study in psychology at Harvard, which he left without a degree in 1936; Yale's Institute of Human Relations, and a stay with the Oglala Sioux at Pine Ridge that turned his attention to the part the environment plays in child development; the University of California's Institute of Child Welfare from 1939 and private practice near San Francisco, where he wrote Childhood and Society; his refusal of the Berkeley loyalty oath in 1950 and his move in 1951 to the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, where he developed psychobiography. From 1960 to 1970 he was Harvard's professor of human development, teaching an undergraduate course on the human life cycle and a graduate seminar on psychobiography, and he received honorary degrees though he held no degree of his own. Among his later books the minute names Insight and Responsibility, Identity: Youth and Crisis, Gandhi's Truth and Toys and Reasons, which grew out of his Godkin lectures of 1972. It credits him with extending development across the whole life cycle in eight stages, the first five corresponding to Freud's, with a lifelong struggle for identity that reaches a crisis in adolescence, and with a psychobiographical method that came to influence biographical writing. It dates Young Man Luther to 1954, against the first edition of 1958. Erikson died in Harwich, Massachusetts, in May 1994.
See also
People
References
- Erik Erikson: Faculty of Arts and Sciences Memorial Minute2002Evidence for a relation
- Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence1969Evidence for a relation
- Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History1958Evidence for a relation