◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Refuse the Line I am Erik Erikson. I named myself. On my birth certificate I was Erik Salomonsen — though I did not know that until I was an adult, because my mother had not told me. Growing up I was Erik Homburger, my stepfather's name. The name I died under, Erikson, I gave myself when I became an American in 1939. Erik, son of Erik. I made myself my own father. Understand what that means before I say anything else. I did not know who my biological father was. I was the tall blond-haired blue-eyed child of a Danish woman in a Jewish household in Germany. At the synagogue the other children called me the goy. At school the other children called me the Jew. I was the wrong one everywhere. This is the experience that produced my entire life's work. I invented the term identity crisis because I had spent my childhood inside one. I wrote the eight stages of psychosocial development because I had needed to know — and no one had told me — how a self gets made. Let me tell you the part that matters most to your country right now. In every developmental stage, the question is: who are you, and on what is your identity built? And in every stage, the same trap is available. You can do the patient work of integrating who you actually are — or you can take a pre-fab identity from someone offering one. The young person who skips the crisis by joining the cult. Who borrows the leader's identity because doing his own is too hard. I am watching an entire country do this. The man you have made your president is offering identity foreclosure as a political product. He is not asking you to develop. He is asking you to belong. He is selling a pre-fab self that requires no self-examination, no integration, no acknowledgment of what your country actually is alongside what it has imagined itself to be. The hat is the identity. The flag is the identity. The grievance is the identity. The hated other is the identity. None of these is yours. They were handed to you. The handing is the whole transaction. Now I want to give you the concept I believe is the most important now. I called it pseudospeciation. It is the human tendency to redraw the species line — to define one's own group as fully human and other groups as less than. Every genocide in history begins with pseudospeciation. The Nazis I fled in 1933 had made the Jews into a different species. The white settlers had made the indigenous peoples into a different species. The slaveholders had made the Africans into a different species. The line is not biological. It is psychological. It is drawn by people who need to feel large by making other people small. I am watching it being redrawn now. The migrant is being made into a different species. The trans child is being made into a different species. The political opponent is being made into a different species. The line is being drawn before your eyes by people who tell you it has always been there. It has not always been there. The line was erased after the war, in part because the world had just seen what happens when it is drawn. You are watching the redrawing. Refuse the line. Refuse the leader who is drawing it. Refuse the identity that requires somebody else to be less than human in order for you to feel like a human. And do the harder thing. Become your own father. Become your own mother. Make the identity yourself, by the patient work of integrating who you actually are with who you have been and who you wish to be. Trust has to be built. Industry has to be earned. Generativity — the task of the second half of life — is what you give to the people who come after you, which is the only thing of yours that survives you. I made myself an American in 1939 because America was, at that moment, the place that drew no line for me. You have the choice now of whether to be the country that took me in or the country I fled. Choose.