Race and Prejudice in Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society

Abstract: Erik H. Erikson is widely appreciated as a theorist of the life cycle, identity, and psychohistory. But in Childhood and Society (1963[1950]), Erikson also did innovative work in the borderland of psychoanalysis and anthropology—cultural work that is often acknowledged but seldom examined closely. I explore Erikson’s elusive way of thinking about racial prejudice, identity, and internalized racism in the context of majority-minority dynamics. Childhood and Society was ahead of its time in its understanding of cultural trauma and in its empathic focus on the exclusion of racialized minorities in American democracy. An immigrant who himself possessed a divided identity, Erikson understood cultural and developmental barriers to dignity. Yet his work on Jewish culture, post-genocidal native Americans, and Black Americans under segregation also shows the limitations of the white liberalism of his time. Though Erikson made daring use of participant observation and added social context to Freudian thinking, he also drew on and arguably perpetuated racial and ethnic stereotypes. An admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt rather than Karl Marx, Erikson reflected the promise and perils of Western cosmopolitanism—especially its certainty that psychoanalysis could provide a universal basis for inquiry into difference in a racialized society.