Encounters with Erik Erikson

Abstract This Chapter is bifocal. It is as much about Erik Erikson as it is about the author. It is as much about Erikson the thinker – the founder of the psychosocial perspective and of the new methodology called ‘psychohistory’ – as about Erikson, the human being who argued that an individual should be characterized not so much by what one represses or disavows but by all the contradictions one is able to unify. Written in a psycho-biographical model, this Chapter foregrounds what the author himself could not easily unify in his youth, for example, possible careers in engineering, economics and psychology. It is also the narrative of an Indian youth’s identity crisis, torn also between western style autonomy-individuality and traditional Indian familial ties. Erikson is also seen in this Chapter as less of a teacher and more of a Guru; and psychoanalysis as a form of training in the metaphorical Gurukula. The author foregrounds the ‘innate’ Indian conviction that a student learns more from a teacher by identification with him than by critique. The author sees much merit in the tradition of ancient Indian scholarship, wherein scholars did not take credit for their own innovations but presented them as elaborations of their teachers’ ideas. One humbly added a footnote to the teacher’s text. One did not have to demolish the teacher’s text. The modern western idea of critique not just banishes emotions but believes that a scholarly career must begin with the ‘killing’ of the teacher’s text. The Chapter makes a connection between the metaphorical killing of the teacher’s idea(s) and the dominant myth of Western psychoanalysis that Oedipal parricide is the route to autonomous creativity. This Chapter is a psychoanalytic reflection on the process of psychoanalytic training.