Social Violence and Conservative Social Psychology: The Case of Erik Erikson

Abstract

Erikson links intergroup violence to the fashion communities train their members to see themselves and otherness. The result of role learning or identity formation is regrettably but typically 'pseudospeciation', a tendency to see one's own group as something more than human while deni grating other groups to an inferior position. Erikson proposes to master pseudospeciation through the practice of judiciousness or 'mutuali ty', the psychological equivalent of the political value of tolerance whose practice he claims to have found demonstrated by Gandhi.

Despite Erikson's obvious humanism, his con cept of mutuality is fundamentally unsatisfactory, for it is caught in an unresolved contradiction be tween his conviction that psychological well-being requires the sheltering environment of established social institutions and his recognition of a need for a critical analysis of social roles. Since Erik son's most fundamental theoretical tenets stress the importance of individual adaptation to socially prescribed forms of behavior, mutuality bids fair to function as a conservative political ideology. In its basic terms, Erikson's argument is common to an entire school of social psychology and the analysis of its limitations is therefore of relevance to the general discussion of the character and con trol of human aggression.