Identity : youth and crisis / Erik H. Erikson.

I. Prologue. -- II. Foundations in observation : 1. A clinician's notebook -- 2. On totalitarianism -- III. The life cycle: epigenesis of identity : 1. Infancy and the mutuality of recognition -- 2. Early childhood and the will to be oneself -- 3. Childhood and the anticipation of roles -- 4. School age and task identification -- 5. Adolescence. -- 6. Beyond identity -- IV. Identity confusion in life history and case history : 1. Biographic I: creative confusion. (1) G.B.S. (age 70) on young Shaw (age 20). -- (2) William James, his own alienist -- 2. Genetic: identification and identity -- 3. Pathographic: the clinical picture of severe identity confusion -- 4. Societal: from individual confusion to social order -- 5. Biographic II.: the confusion returns, psychopathology of every night. (1) Freud's dream of Irma -- (2) William James's terminal dream -- V. Theoretical interlude : 1. Ego and environment -- 2. Confusion, transference, and resistance -- 3. I, my self, and my ego -- 4. A communality of egos -- 5. Theory and ideology -- VI. Toward contemporary issues: youth -- VII. Womanhood and the inner space -- VIII. Race and the wider identity.

Essays in ego psychology, based on papers written from 1951 to 1967, by a neo-Freudian analyst and theorist.

This edition is a collection of Erik H. Erikson's major essays on topics originating in the concept of adolescent identity crisis. Identity, Erikson writes, is an unfathomable as it is all-pervasive. It deals with a process that is located both in the core of the individual and in the core of the communal culture. As the culture changes, new kinds of identity questions arise--Erikson comments, for example, on issues of social protest and changing gender roles that were particular to the 1960s. 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.