Erik Erikson Quotes

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play.

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.

The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others." ~ Erik Erikson

Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

Erik Erikson has commented: Potentially creative men like (Bernard) Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, at last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden.

Life doesn't make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.

Anxieties are diffuse states of tension (caused by a loss of mutual regulation and a consequent upset in libidinal and aggressive controls) which magnify and even cause the illusion of an outer danger, without pointing to appropriate avenues of defense or mastery.

Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness.

If you have ever talked about having an “identity crisis” you have psychologist Erik Erikson to thank for inventing the term. Erikson

Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all. –Erik Erikson  

Acceptance is the end of our argument with reality. Once we face the facts, no matter how disturbing they are, we feel calmer and less crazy. Erik Erikson defined clarity as “the capacity to fear accurately.

You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what's wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever's in them rises to the surface in free play.

There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding." ~

Don’t Forget The Story “The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.” Erik Erikson

Children cannot be fooled by empty praise and condescending encouragement. They may have to accept artificial bolstering of their self-esteem in lieu of something better, but what I call their accruing ego identity gains real strength only from wholehearted and consistent recognition of real accomplishment, that is, achievement that has meaning in their culture.

What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life. This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable. With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.

modern times, of course, political ideologies have taken over the numinous function, with the face of the leader multiplied on a thousand banners.

Shame, according to the renowned psychologist, Erik Erikson, in Identity, Youth, and Crisis, is a learned experience, a diversion taught to infants by their parents.

We all dimly feel that our transient historical identity is the only chance in all eternity to be alive as a somebody in a here and a now. We, therefore, dread the possibility, of which we are most aware when deeply young or very old, that at the end we may find that we have lived the wrong life or not really lived at all.

Erik Erikson coined the term “pseudo-speciation” to describe our xenophobic instinct. It is as if we rejected out of hand the unity of the species, setting up in its place a thousand egregious dichotomies. —Melvin Konner, Why the Reckless Survive

A creative man has no choice. He may come across his supreme task almost accidentally. But once the issue is joined, his task proves to be at the same time intimately related to his most personal conflicts, to his superior selective perception, and to the stubbornness of his one-way will; he must court sickness, failure, or insanity in order to test the alternative whether the established world will crush him, or whether he will disestablish a sector of this world's outworn fundaments and make place for a new one.

No man can claim that he is absolutely in the right or that a particular thing is wrong because he thinks so, but it is wrong for him so long as that is his deliberate judgment. It is therefore meet that he should not do that which he knows to be wrong, and suffer the consequence whatever it may be.

Erik Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.2 Psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes of solitude in much the same way. Storr says that in accounts of the creative process, “by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping.... It is a state of mind in which ideas and images are allowed to appear and take their course spontaneously . . . the creator need[s] to be able to be passive, to let things happen within the mind.”3 In the digital life, stillness and solitude are hard to come by.

Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.

And yet the sternness sometimes displayed in your letters to your children bespeaks an appalling sense of doom, as if they, as the product of your sin, had no chance for salvation except as partners in your renunciation.

человек выживает только тогда, когда традиционное детское воспитание снабжает его совестью, которая будет руководить им, не подавляя, и которая настолько тверда и одновременно гибка, чтобы приспосабливаться к превратностям исторической эпохи.

If some busybody were to cross-examine me on the chapters already written, he could probably shed much more light on them, and if it were a hostile critic’s cross-examination, he might even flatter himself for having shown up [make the world laugh by revealing] the hollowness of many of my pretensions.

The psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson devoted a chapter in his Pulitzer Prize—winning book, Childhood and Society, to his reflections on the American identity. “This dynamic country,” he wrote, “subjects its inhabitants to more extreme contrasts and abrupt changes during a generation than is normally the case with other great nations.” Such trends have only accelerated since Erikson made that observation in 1950. The effects of rapid social and economic shifts on the parenting environment are too well known to need detailing here. The erosion of community, the breakdown of the extended family, the pressures on marriage relationships, the harried lives of nuclear families still intact and the growing sense of insecurity even in the midst of relative wealth have all combined to create an emotional milieu in which calm, attuned parenting is becoming alarmingly difficult. The result being successive generations of children in alienation, drug use and violence — what Robert Bly has astutely described as “the rage of the unparented.” Bly notes in The Sibling Society that “in 1935 the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935 are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband.” These patterns characterize not only the earlyyears of parenting, but entire childhoods. “Family meals, talks, reading together no longer take place,” writes Bly. “What the young need — stability, presence, attention, advice, good psychic food, unpolluted stories — is exactly what the sibling society won’t give them.

Since the earliest period of our life was preverbal, everything depended on emotional interaction. Without someone to reflect our emotions, we had no way of knowing who we were. Mirroring remains important during our entire lives. Think of the frustrating experience, which most of us have had, of talking to someone who is not looking at us. While you are speaking, they are fidgeting around or reading something. Our identity demands a significant other whose eyes see us pretty much as we see ourselves. In fact, Erik Erikson defines identity as interpersonal. In Childhood and Society he writes: The sense of ego identity is the accrued confidence that the inner sameness and continuity . . . are matched by the sameness and continuity of one’s meaning for others.

Nevertheless, it is true that the first discipline encountered by a young man is the one he must somehow identify with unless he chooses to remain unidentified in his years of need. The discipline he happens to encounter, however, may turn out to be poor ideological fare; poor in view of what, as an individual, he has not yet derived from his childhood problems, and poor in view of the irreversible decisions which begin to crowd in on him.

Reach out to the younger generation—not to advise them but to learn from them, gain energy from them, and support them on their way. Erik Erikson called this kind of reaching out “generativity,” an alternative to the “stagnation” of age that sooner or later leads to despair. 2. Move toward whatever you fear, not away from it. I try to remember the advice I was given on an Outward Bound course when I was frozen with fear on a rock face in the middle of a 100-foot rappel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” If, for example, you fear “the other,” get into his or her story face-to-face, and watch your fear shrink as your empathy expands. 3. Spend time in the natural world, as much time as you can. Nature constantly reminds me that everything has a place, that nothing need be excluded. That “mess” on the forest floor—like the messes in my own life— has an amazing integrity and harmony to it.

Einstein’s personal detachment and scientific creativity seemed to be subtly linked. According to his colleague Abraham Pais, this detachment sprang from Einstein’s salient trait of “apartness,” which led him to reject scientific conventional wisdom as well as emotional intimacies. It is easier to be a nonconformist and rebel, both in science and in a militaristic culture like Germany’s, when you can detach yourself easily from others. “The detachment enabled him to walk through life immersed in thought,” Pais said. It also allowed him—or compelled him—to pursue his theories in both a “single-minded and single-handed” manner.35 Einstein understood the conflicting forces in his own soul, and he seemed to think it was true for all people. “Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being,” he said.36 His own desire for detachment conflicted with his desire for companionship, mirroring the struggle between his attraction and his aversion to fame. Using the jargon of psychoanalysis, the pioneering therapist Erik Erikson once pronounced of Einstein, “A certain alternation of isolation and outgoingness seems to have retained the character of a dynamic polarization.

The first of these is what we may call a polarization of sexual differences (V.6), i.e., the elaboration of a particular ratio of masculinity and femininity in line with identity development. Some of our patients suffer more lastingly and malignantly from a state not uncommon in a milder and transient form in all adolescence: the young person does not feel himself clearly to be a member of one sex or the other, which may make him the easy victim of the pressure emanating, for example, from homosexual cliques, for to some persons it is more bearable to be typed as something, anything, than to endure drawn-out bisexual confusion

...there is something Russian about this particular use of the eye as an aggressive and defensive weapon. In Russian literature there is endless variation in the use of the eye as a soulful receptor, as an avid grasper, and as the very organ for mutual soulful surrender. In regard to the great models of political and literary life, however, the emphasis is on the eye as an incorruptible instrument for the manipulation of the future. Gorky's description of Tolstoy is typical: 'With sharp eyes, from which neither a single pebble nor a single thought could hide itself, he looked, measured, tested, compared.' Or again, his eyes are 'screwed up as though straining to look into the future'. Equally typical is Trotsky's description of Lenin: When Lenin, his left eye narrowed, receives a wireless containing a speech he resembles a devilishly clever peasant who does not let himself be confused by any words, or deluded by any phrases. That is highly intensified peasant shrewdness, lifted to the point of inspiration.

ERIK ERIKSON, ONE OF the most innovative psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, wrote about these moments of existential review in his work on the human life cycle. He famously argued that all of us go through eight stages of development, each marked by a specific conflict.

None was to touch any one’s property on the way. They were to bear it patiently if any official or non-official European met them and abused or even flogged them. They were to allow themselves to be arrested if the police offered to arrest them.

And as was Gandhi’s wont, he would not only insist on hygienic and social restraints but would preach to this group the basic ethical rules for the forthcoming march: None was to touch any one’s property on the way. They were to bear it patiently if any official or non-official European met them and abused or even flogged them. They were to allow themselves to be arrested if the police offered to arrest them.

and landowning class in their economic and political fortresses could well afford to be open-minded in order to keep the influx of Indian labor coming.

The law, of course, reflected the sense of threat shared by the majority of whites and had long since begun to

For both Indians and whites were outnumbered ten to one by hundreds of thousands of Natal Zulus. The Indians, of course, considered themselves to be closer to the whites than to the blacks, both as descendants of an ancient civilization and as adherents to three world religions. But to the whites they were nonwhites and therefore a cultural and political wedge for the masses of blacks. And as everywhere, it was the poorer whites, the petty white traders, and even white labor, whose fears were most vociferous, while the wealthy and landowning class in their economic and political fortresses could well afford to be open-minded in order to keep the influx of Indian labor coming. The law, of course, reflected the sense of threat shared by the majority of whites and had long since begun to control all nonwhites in a web of demeaning police ordinances.

Within two weeks Gandhi and his friends (old Muslim merchants in carriages and young Christians on foot) had collected ten thousand signatures which were affixed to a petition sent to the Colonial Secretary.

An infant of two or three months will smile at even half a painted dummy face, if that half of the face is fully represented and has at least two clearly defined points or circles for eyes; more the infant does not need, but he will not smile for less. The infant's instinctive smile seems to have exactly that purpose which is its crowning effect, namely, that the adult feels recognized, and in return expresses recognition in the form of loving and providing.

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity. ERIK ERIKSON

Behind every man's insistence on masculine superiority there is an age-old envy of women.

attachment theory, which predicts social competency and the ability to thrive as functions of nurturing early attachments, of bonding; and Erik Erikson, whose work suggests that the violation of the child’s trust leads to a life of increasingly perilous failures of trust; and D. W. Winnicott, the British pediatrician whose writings stress the importance of parental love, the ongoing connection between mother and child. All these authors describe the crucial role of touch, and of the family setting as a place of safety and security.

Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all

THE STRATEGIC CONSEQUENCES OF CHINESE RACISM: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States Draft Report Submitted 7 January 2013 Project Number: HQ006721370003000 Since our genus Homo first evolved in the Pliocene, humans have favored those who are biologically related. In general, the closer the relationship, the greater the preferential treatment. The vast majority of animals behave in this way, and humans are no different. In a world of scarce resources and many threats, the evolutionary process would select nepotism, thus promoting the survival of the next generation. However, this process is relative. Parents are more willing to provide for their own children than for the children of relatives, or rarely for those of strangers. The essence of an inclusive fitness explanation of ethnocentrism, then, is that individuals generally should be more willing to support, privilege, and sacrifice for their own family, then their more distant kin, their ethnic group, and then others, such as a global community, in decreasing order of importance. ... The in-group/out-group division is also important for explaining ethnocentrism and individual readiness to kill outsiders before in-group members. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt draws on psychologist Erik Erikson’s concept of “cultural pseudo speciation,” and says that in almost all cultures humans form subgroups usually based on kinship; these “eventually distinguish themselves from others by dialect and other subgroup characteristics and go on to form new cultures.” ... When an individual considers whether to support a larger group, several metrics are available. One of these ... is ethnocentrism, a continuation of one’s willingness to sacrifice for one’s family because of the notion of common kinship. As I discussed above, the ways humans determine their relations with unrelated individuals are complex, but the key factors are physical resemblance, as well as environmental causes like shared culture, history, and language. ... I have shown that in-group/out-group distinctions like ethnocentrism and xenophobia are not quirks of human behavior in certain settings. Instead, they are systematic and consistent behavioral strategies, or traits. They apply to all humans... They are widespread because they increased survival and reproductive success and were thus favored by natural selection over evolutionary history. ... Chinese racism ... is a strategic asset that makes a formidable adversary. ... The government educates the people to be proud of being Han and of China. In turn, the Chinese people are proud and fiercely patriotic as well as ethnocentric, racist, and xenophobic. This aids the government and permits them to maintain high levels of popular support. ...

It took me more than a decade to work my way through the landscape. I owe my liberation from it to the work of geographer David Lowenthal and social critic Marshall McLuhan. Their writing convinced me that the world-as-picture was, on one hand, geared to the superficiality of taste and, on the other, an outcome of a Renaissance mathematical perspective that tended to separate rather than join. Walter Ong's essay "The World as View and the World as Event" convinced me that this distinction between the visual and the tactile was more than ideological. The landscape was an inadequate nexus. It was only a twist in the idea of the co-option of the earth. Indeed, such ideas depended as much on unconscious perception as on intellectual or artistic formulations. I began to feel that something still more biogenic, yet common to humankind, which yet might take partic­ular social or aesthetic expression, held the key to an adequate human ecology. “Over the next decade I read anthropology and child psychology. During that time a meeting of anthropologists took place in Chicago that resulted in the publication of Man the Hunter. I began to think that the appropriate model for human society in its earth habitat may have existed for several million years. If Claude Levi-Strauss were to be believed, nothing had been gained by the onset of civilization except technical mastery, while what had been lost or distorted was a way of interpreting in which nature was an unlimited but essential poetic and intellectual instrument in the achieve­ment of human self-consciousness, both in evolution and in every genera­ tion and individual human life. I knew such an idea would be ridiculed as a throwback to the discredited figure of the noble savage, but when it was considered in light of Erik Erikson's concept of individual development as an identity-shaping sequence I found it irresistible.

These observations can underscore their sense of loneliness. The psychologist Erik Erikson said that adolescents’ essential task is to develop a sense of identity. They rebel against, but also look to, their chief role models, their parents, as they ask questions about who they’ll become. Among adoptees who lack access to their personal history, this process is complicated by the knowledge that no matter how they are loved, wanted, and wished for, they understand that a crucial part of themselves is lost. This can become a source of identity confusion, and some researchers say it results in shame, feelings of abandonment, embarrassment, and low

Asteria’s Ship’s Library Sailing Books Admiralty, NP 136, Ocean Passages of the World, 1973 (1895).  Admiralty, NP 303 / AP 3270, Rapid Sight Reduction Tables for Navigation Vol 1 & Vol 2 & Vol3. Admiralty, The Nautical Almanac 2018 & 2019. Errol Bruce: Deep Sea Sailing, 1954. K. Adlard Coles: Heavy Weather Sailing, 1967. Tom Cunliffe: Celestial Navigation, 1989. Andrew Evans: Single Handed Sailing, 2015. Rob James: Ocean Sailing, 1980. Robin Knox-Johnston: A World of my Own, 1969. Robin Knox-Johnston: On Seamanship & Seafaring, 2018. Bernard Moitessier: The Long Route, 1971. Hal Roth: Handling Storms at Sea, 2009. Spike Briggs & Campbell Mackenzie: Skipper's Medical Emergency Handbook, 2015 Essays Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays, 1955. Biographies Pamela Eriksson: The Duchess, 1958. Olaf Harken: Fun Times in Boats, Blocks & Business, 2015. Martti Häikiö: VA Koskenniemi 1–2, 2009. Eino Koivistoinen: Gustaf Erikson – King of Sailing Ships, 1981. Erik Tawaststjerna: Jean Sibelius 1–5, 1989. Novels Ingmar Bergman: The Best Intentions, 1991. Bo Carpelan: Axel, 1986. Joseph Conrad: The End of the Tether, 1902. Joseph Conrad: Youth and Other Stories 1898–1910.  Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, 1902. Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim, 1900. James Joyce: Ulysses, 1922, (translation Pentti Saarikoski 1982). Volter Kilpi: In the Alastalo Hall I – II, 1933. Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks, 1925. Harry Martinson: The Road, 1948. Hjalmar Nortamo: Collected Works, 1938. Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time 1–10, 1922. Poems Aaro Hellaakoski: Collected Poems. Homer: Odysseus, c. 700 BC (translation Otto Manninen). Harry Martinson: Aniara, 1956. Lauri Viita: Collected Poems. Music Classic Jean Sibelius Sergei Rachmaninov Sergei Prokofiev Gustav Mahler Franz Schubert Giuseppe Verdi Mozart Carl Orff Richard Strauss Edvard Grieg Max Bruch Jazz Ben Webster Thelonius Monk Oscar Peterson Miles Davis Keith Jarrett Errol Garner Dizzy Gillespie & Benny Dave Brubeck Stan Getz Charlie Parker Ella Fitzgerald John Coltrane Other Ibrahim Ferrer, Buena Vista Social Club Jobim & Gilberto, Eric Clapton Carlos Santana Bob Dylan John Lennon Beatles Sting Rolling Stones Dire Straits Mark Knopfler Moody Blues Pink Floyd Jim Morrison The Doors Procol Harum Leonard Cohen Led Zeppelin Kim Carnes Jacques Brel Yves Montand Edit Piaf

Why do we think the face has turned away which only looked elsewhere?

The search of youth is not for all-permissibility, but rather for new ways of directly facing up to what truly counts.

In the social jungle of human existence there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally liked to create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: “the contemplation of ruins,” Erikson observes, “is a masculine specialty.” No matter the mesmerizing grace and beauty of a great boxing match, it is the catastrophic finale for which everyone waits, and hopes: the blocks piled as high as they can possibly be piled, then brought spectacularly down.

Shame, according to the renowned psychologist, Erik Erikson, in Identity, Youth, and Crisis, is a learned experience,

Shakespeare delineated seven ages of man in As You Like It in 1599; Erik Erikson defined eight stages in Childhood and Society three hundred

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

When we looked at the life cycle in our 40s, we looked to old people for wisdom. At 80, though, we look at other 80-year-olds to see who got wise and who not. Lots of old people don't get wise, but you don't get wise unless you age.

Over the next few pages, I’d like to sketch out this theory of life tasks, which I’ve adapted from the developmental psychologists, especially from scholars like Erik Erikson, the author of “Life Cycle Completed,” and Robert Kegan, author of “The Evolving Self.” As I lay them out for you, I should make it clear once again that these are just templates, not photographs. It’s not like every person goes through the same life tasks in the same way. The templates simply name some common patterns of human behavior. They help us step back and recognize ways in which you or I might be like the template and ways in which you or I might be different from the template. The templates also remind us that each person you meet is involved in a struggle. Here are a few common life tasks, along with the states of consciousness that arise to help us meet each one. THE IMPERIAL TASK