Top 41 Erik Erikson Quotes
#2. The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.
Erik Erikson
#3. You can actively flee, then, and you can actively stay put.
Erik Erikson
#4. When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.
Erik Erikson
#5. Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.
Erik Erikson
#6. The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play.
Erik Erikson
#7. Parents must not only have certain ways of guiding by prohibition and permission, they must also be able to represent to the child a deep, almost somatic conviction that there is meaning in what they are doing.
Erik Erikson
#8. In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.
Erik Erikson
#9. Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.
Erik Erikson
#10. The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.
Erik Erikson
#11. There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding, which constitutes a new hope and a new responsibility for all.
Erik Erikson
#12. Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.
Erik Erikson
#13. Life doesn't make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.
Erik Erikson
#14. If life is to be sustained, hope must remain ...
Erik Erikson
#15. The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live.
Erik Erikson
#17. Hope is the enduring belief in the attainability of fervent wishes, in spite of the dark urges and rages which mark the beginning of existence. Hope is the ontogenetic basis of faith, and is nourished by the adult faith which pervades patterns of care.
Erik Erikson
#18. Farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters - where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives, as moral as they must be, as free as they may be, and as masterly as they can be. If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness.
Erik Erikson
#19. Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness; his defeats will substantiate it.
Erik Erikson
#20. We cannot leave history entirely to nonclinical observers and to professional historians.
Erik Erikson
#21. Will, therefore, is the unbroken determination to exercise free choice as well as self-restraint, in spite of the unavoidable experience of shame and doubt in infancy.
Erik Erikson
#22. He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the world.
Erik Erikson
#23. The way you 'take history' is also a way of 'making history.'
Erik Erikson
#24. The American feels too rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.
Erik Erikson
#25. If there is any responsibility in the cycle of life it must be that one generation owes to the next that strength by which it can come to face ultimate concerns in its own way.
Erik Erikson
#27. When we looked at the life cycle in our 40s, we looked to old people for wisdom. At 80, though, we look at other 80-year-olds to see who got wise and who not. Lots of old people don't get wise, but you don't get wise unless you age.
Erik Erikson
#28. If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.
Erik Erikson
#29. In America nature is autocratic, saying, I am not arguing, I am telling you.
Erik Erikson
#30. The psychoanalytic method is essentially a historical method.
Erik Erikson
#32. A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.
Erik Erikson
#33. The sense of identity provides the ability to experience one's self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.
Erik Erikson
#34. The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.
Erik Erikson
#35. Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
Erik Erikson
#36. Let us face it: 'deep down' nobody in his right mind can visualize his own existence without assuming that he has always lived and will live hereafter.
Erik Erikson
#37. Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.
Erik Erikson
#38. Man's true taproots are nourished in the sequence of generations, and he loses his taproots in disrupted developmental time, not in abandoned localities.
Erik Erikson
#39. The fact that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life is the core of human tragedy.
Erik Erikson
#40. You've got to learn to accept the law of life, and face the fact that we disintegrate slowly.
Erik Erikson
#41. Men have always shown a dim knowledge of their better potentialities by paying homage to those purest leaders who taught the simplest and most inclusive rules for an undivided mankind.
Erik Erikson
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