Childhood And Society Erikson Erik Homburger by Erikson, Erik Homburger 9780393347388, 0393347389 instant download after payment.

From Foreword to the First Edition:

First: this book originated in the practice of psychoanalysis. Its main chapters are based on specimen situations which called for interpretation and correction: anxiety in young children, apathy in American Indians, confusion in veterans of war, arrogance in young Nazis. In these, as in all situations, the psychoanalytic method detects conflict; for this method was first focused on mental disturbance. Through the work of Freud, nmrotic, conflict has become the most comprehensively studied aspect of human behavior. However, this book avoids the easy conclusion that our relatively advanced knowledge of neurosis permits us to view mass phenomena—culture, religion, revolution—as analogies of neuroses in order to make them amenable to our concepts. We will pursue a different path.

Psychoanalysis today is implementing the study of the (egoj a concept denoting man's cap^adty tQ.unify his experience and his action in an adaptive manner. It is shifting its emphasis from the concentrated study of the conditions which blunt and distort the individual ego to the study of the ego's roots in social organization. This we try to understand not in order to offer a rash cure to a rashly diagnosed society, but in order first to complete the blueprint of our theory.

In this sense, this is a psychoanalytic book on the relation of the ego to society.

This is a book on childhood. One may scan work after work on history, society, and morality and find little reference to the fact that all people start as children and that all peoples begin in their nurseries. It is human to have a long childhood; it is civilized to have an everlonger childhood. Long childhood makes a technical and mental virtuoso out of man, but it also leaves a lifelong residue of emotional immaturity in him. While tribes and nations, in many intuitive ways, use child training to the end of gaining their particular form of mature human identity, their unique version of integrity.