Combining the insights of clinical psychoanalysis with a new approach to cultural anthropology, Childhood and Society deals with the relationships between childhood training and cultural accomplishment, analyzing the infantile and the mature, the modern and the archaic elements in human motivation. It was hailed upon its first publication as "a rare and living combination of European and American thought in the human sciences" (Margaret Mead, The American Scholar). Translated into numerous foreign languages, it has gone on to become a classic in the study of the social...

Representing two decades of groundbreaking work, the essays are not so much a systematic formulation of theory as an evolving report that is both clinical and theoretical. The subjects range from "creative confusion" in two famous lives--the dramatist George Bernard Shaw and the philosopher William James--to the connection between individual struggles and social order. "Race and the Wider Identity" and the controversial "Womanhood and the Inner Space" are included in the collection.

"Ego Development and Historical Change" is a selection of extensive notes in which Erikson first undertook to relate to each other observations on groups studied on field trips and on children studied longitudinally and clinically. These notes are representative of the source material used forChildhood and Society. "Growth and Crises of the Health Personality" takes Erikson beyond adolescence, into the critical stages of the whole life cycle In the third and last essay, Erikson deals with "The Problem of Ego Identity" successively from biographical, clinical, and social points of...