ABSTRACT
The Danish psychoanalyst Erik Erikson adopted a slightly more upbeat view of the life course, seeing it instead as a series of profoundly rich developmental phases up to and including death. Change, he believed, was never easy: it disrupts, disorientates, causes us grief, and takes time to readjust. Perhaps it was because he lived such a peripatetic and multicultural existence, that Erikson saw life as a series of identity crises, resolved only through adapting to the necessities of our social, ethnic, historical, and political environments. This chapter examines how the polarities or Erikson’s crises intersect with events across our working lives. The reality is that over half the adult population is exposed to a severe stressor at some point during our lives, and nearly everyone develops a post-traumatic stress reaction shortly after. A tension exists between our skills in reading another’s mind and our fear of communal life: being at the table or on the menu.
