good-enough holding

identity crisis

identity versus role confusion

psychosocial development

woman

nationality

American

German

occupation / innovator as

psychoanalyst

psychologist

developmental psychologist

university professor

Yale University

scientific organization

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

university teacher

non-fiction writer

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is defined by the kind of man she choses to wish to be chosen by. Her somatic design harbors an 'inner space' destined to bear the offspring of chosen men, and with it, she is defined by a biological, psychological and ethical commitment to take care of human infancy.

Erik Erikson of Harvard University (1964), upon noting that young women often ask whether they can 'have an identity before they know whom they will marry, and for whom they will make a home', explains somewhat elegiacally that 'much of a young woman's identity is already defined in her kind of attractiveness and in the selectivity of her search for the man (or men) by whom she wishes to be sought. . . ' Mature womanly fulfillment, for Erikson, rests on the fact that a woman's 'somatic design harbors an 'inner space' destined to bear the offspring of chosen men, and with it, a biological, psychological and ethical commitment to take care of human infancy.' ' ( Naomi Weisstei)

Erik EriksonThinkers

Erik Erikson