IDENTITY RECONSIDERED

This paper explores and attempts to explain the paradox that Erik Erikson-after Freud, undoubtedly the psychoanalyst best known. most deeply esteemed, and most widely influential in the sociohistorical surround of world culture-has at the same time never been properly integrated into the psychoanalytic mainstream, but has instead been marginalized, consigned to a persisting psychoanalytic limbo. Two succes-sive contexts within the historical unfolding of psychoanalysis in America, the milieu in which Erikson worked, would seem to account for this neglect. First, Erikson’s monumental contributions to our understanding of the psychosocial developmental process, of the epigenesis of the ego, of the phase-specific developmental tasks across the eight postulated stages of the life cycle, and of the intergenerational cogwheeling of the life cycles were made during the 1950s and 1960s and could not easily be integrated into the ego psychology metapsychological paradigm then monolithically regnant within American psychoanalysis. And, second, as