Blackwell Reference Online

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In his classic study, Childhood and Society , the psychologist Erik H. Erikson observed: “Whatever one may come to consider a truly American trait can be shown to have its equally characteristic opposite” (1950: 285). The observation has a certain plausibility, even though a similar ambivalence can be found in many national cultures, traceable to a variety of causes. Yet Erikson insisted that this bipolarity was especially pronounced in the modern American instance. In none of the other great nations of the world, he believed, were inhabitants subjected to more extreme contrasts than in the United States. The tensions between individualism and conformity, internationalism and isolationism, open-mindedness and closed-mindedness, cosmopolitanism and xenophobia, for example, have nowhere been as powerfully felt, he contended, as in America. Such sweeping generalizations about “national character,” American or otherwise, have come to be regarded as artifacts of the 1950s, and have long since passed out of favor, superseded by doctrines that emphasize pluralism and social heterogeneity, and stress the artificiality and “inventedness” of the modern nation-state. That trend is, in itself, representative of one of the central intellectual developments of the century. But there is plenty of evidence for the cogency of Erikson's dictum. Nowhere is it illustrated more vividly than in the ... log in or subscribe to read full text