American culture has been unusually receptive to psychoanalytic systems of thought; and Erik H. Erikson, the most eminent contemporary exponent of ego psychology, has been particularly influential. His ethical orientation, as well as some of his key clinical concepts, has matched distinctively American needs. Yet Erikson has also helped to liberate us from the constraints of early psychoanalytic thought. His psychology has been a way of getting away from the dogmatism of “orthodox” psychoanalysis, although at the same time he may have lost some valuable features of the Freudian heritage.
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