Growing Older Together Erik Erikson and Alfred Schultz

Growing Older Together: Temporality, Mutuality, and Performance in the Thought of AlfredSchutz and Erik EriksonAuthor(s): Lucy BregmanSource: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Apr., 1973), pp. 195-215Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202032Accessed: 20/08/2009 10:10

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Growing Older Together: Temporality, Mutuality, and Performance in the Thought of Alfred Schutz and Erik Erikson

Lucy Bregman

Every time the rite... is repeated, the archetypal action of the god or ancestor is being repeated, that action which took place at the beginning of time, or, in other words, in a mythical time.... Whether he became the hero himself, or merely a contemporary of the hero's, the Melanesian was living in a mythical present that could not possibly be confused with any profane kind of time.... It would be impossible to overstress the tendency ... to bring back that time, mythical time, the Great Time. For this bringing-back is effected without exception by every rite and every significant act.1

The purpose of this paper is to examine the three ideas which Eliade

brings together in this passage from Patterns in Comparative Religion: a special sort of time, becoming contemporary with another, and "rite" or performance. For Eliade, the return to illo tempore is the key to archaic religiousness; our own modern "desacralized" condition is marked by an inability to escape profane time. We moderns can be contemporary only with ourselves. I will argue against such a view of modernity, by showing how for twentieth-century people, as well as for archaic man, an interrelation exists among special forms of

mutuality-" becoming contemporary with"-a performance situation, and a non-everyday mode of time.

The meanings of these terms, and their connections with each

other, will be established through a close look at two twentieth-century thinkers not concerned explicitly with the question of modern religiousness. Alfred Schutz, using Husserlian phenomenology, examined the

process by which meanings are constituted in everyday life. Schutz's

organizing principle in this project was the introduction of temporality, drawing heavily not only on Husserl's internal time-consciousness but on Bergson's notion of duree. To describe the experience of shared

1 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1967), pp. 394-95.

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The Journal of Religion

temporality, Schutz supplied the phrase "growing older together." Out of an entirely different strand of twentieth-century thought, Erik Erikson, our second thinker, revised the psychoanalytic theory of development through the two related notions of "identity" and "mutuality"; his thought can be taken as an expansion of "growing older together" as the fundamental human experience of mutual activation. But in introducing Eriksonian thought, it seemed fitting to turn not just to Erikson's own theoretical writings but to a study by William Henry and John Sims which attempted to validate his constructs, and finally to data from that study. In the fantasies of modern people we can perceive the fundamental experiences upon which Schutz and Erikson have based their theoretical structures. Both these thinkers share an overall view of social reality as a human construction, and emphasize the individual's active participation in the creation of social meanings.

The impact of both Schutz's and Eriskon's positions is to transform the experience described by Eliade from a paradigm of archaic religiousness into a permanent human possibility. At the end of the paper, I will offer several suggestions based on this understanding of twentieth- century materials. Even if one has qualms about easily identifying the kind of experiences toward which Schutz and Erikson point with "religion," it is enough at this point to allow that these experiences could be interpreted as precarious attempts on the part of modern people to escape the tyranny of "profane" everydayness. On this assumption the data of psychology on twentieth-century people becomes of equal stature with that of anthropology and history of religions, whereas for Eliade the psychologist studies only "approximate variants" of what the historian of religions can grasp in its original state.2 Al- though the psychological materials used in this paper cannot possibly be said to "prove" any overall conclusions about the spirituality of "modern man," they do allow, when taken seriously, for an open- ended view of modern experience, and the variety of forms which life within "modernity" can take.

I. SCHUTZ: CGROWING OLDER TOGETHER" IN THE

EVERYDAY WORLD AND MUSICAL PERFORMANCE

Using Bergson and Husserl's notion of an inner duree, an internal time-consciousness which is radically prior to our ordinary spatialized idea of temporality, Alfred Schutz reinterpreted the methodological

2 Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969), p. 21.

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Growing Older Together

questions which had perplexed Weber, questions of the meaningfulness of social action. Schutz's basic theory, as presented in The Phenomenology of the Social World, rests on the dichotomy between experience as lived in the duree, the "flow of duration," and experience as "typified" or

already past. We know our own experiences, and thus are able to attend to them and constitute them, making them "meaningful," only as passed away. Out of this interpretation experience-a kind of

stopping and thinking-we accumulate a stock of schema derived from past experiences, typifications out of which our everyday world is constructed. However, fundamental to Schutz's view is the fact that whereas the world of objectifications can be a product only of experiences-as-past, the universal basis for this world is the fact of our

experience in the mode of the duree: this occurs every time we have an experience which Schutz calls a "we-relationship."

What is a "we-relationship" and why is it central to Schutz's

thinking about the social world ? Although Schutz's thought is dependent on Husserl in many ways, their basic projects are essentially different. Husserl used transcendental phenomenology to search for an absolute and indubitable grounding for all scientific knowledge; Schutz was concerned to analyze the structures of the "everyday world" from a phenomenological perspective, and the everyday world is in essence social. Husserl had been faced with the "problem" of

intersubjectivity after establishing the transcendental ego as the only true subject of phenomenological statements,3 but for Schutz inter-

subjectivity-the thesis of the alter ego-was not a "problem" but a

phenomenological given. The "we-relationship," whose temporal mode is that of "growing older together," takes the place of the transcendental ego as the appropriate starting place for phenomenological reflections on the constitution of meaning, when the structure of sociality is to be understood. The other person, the Thou, "is conscious, and his stream of consciousness is temporal in character, exhibiting the same basic forms as mine."4 Thus, one can talk of shared experience, a "simultaneity": "What we mean ... by the

simultaneity of two durations or streams of consciousness is simply this: the phenomenon of growing older together."5 In the we-relationship, I am face to face with an Other; more important, we "share time."

3 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, I969), pp. 89-92.

4 Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 98.

5 Ibid., p. 103.

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I attend to his experiences in the mode of the vivid present (the duree), although I can attend to my own only in the mode of pastness. "The result is that I am incomparably better attuned to him than I am to

myself."6 That this "pure we-relationship" exists as a dimension of our experience, makes it possible for Schutz to consider all forms of sociality as derivatives of this face-to-face shared temporality, of

growing older together. "And because I grasp what is going on in his mind only through the medium of his perceived bodily movements, this act of grasping is for me a lived experience that transcends my own stream of consciousness" 7 and yet remains close to it.8

Thus, Schutz centers the basic human experience of sociality into

Bergson's duree, whereas self-reflection and typification exist only in the

pastness of the reflective constituting consciousness. The everyday world as Schutz structures it becomes a continuum of "anonymity" or distance from the living experience of the we-relationship. The more

anonymous and "typed" are our experiences of others, the more they are remote from the shared duree, the less chance we have to grow older together. In the everyday world, we have "contemporaries," "they-relationships" with all those with whom we are not in we-

relationships. Schutz has eight gradients of "distance" for this world, beginning with friends from whom one is temporarily separated, proceeding in the direction of anonymity and "theyness" through "mailmen" (functionally defined ideal types) to "artifacts of any kind which bear witness to the subjective meaning-context of some unknown person." 9 All "they-relationships " are expressed by typifications; none involve, therefore, the mode of the lived, vivid present.

6 Ibid., p. I69. 7 Ibid., pp. 166-67. 8 It is probably misleading to compare Schutz's treatment of the we-relationship

to Martin Buber's famous "I-Thou." Schutz is not concerned with the depth of the relationship, but with its structure in contrast with all other temporal modes of sociality. On the other hand, Buber's description of his encounter with a cat would perfectly match the Schutzian we-relationship. "The beginning of this cat's glance, lighting up under the touch of my glance, indisputably questioned me: It is possible that you think of me? Do you really not just want me to have fun? Do I concern you? Do I exist in your sight? ...... My own glance was certainly more lasting; but it was no longer the streaming human glance" (I and Thou [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958], p. 97). Here the two grow older together in a shared experience of mutual questioning. By implication, one of Schutz's limitations is that his "social world" includes only humans. On this point, see Thomas Luckmann, "On the Boundaries of the Social World," in Phenomenology and Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, I970).

9 Schutz, p. 18I.

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Further "distant" still, according to the scale of the "everyday world," are the worlds of predecessors and successors, with whom I can never have a "we-relationship." This continuum borders on a dichotomy, between

the "we-relationship" and the everyday world of typifications

intimate anonymous vivid vague inner simultaneity understood under the spatial-

ized temporality of "standard time," which is itself a typification necessary to maintain the world of the "they."

Standard or "clock time" is an expansion of time-as-passed, the mode of all typifications and applied schemas.

Schutz in his later writings explored various "worlds" other than that of everyday reality. In a fascinating essay "On Making Music Together," he examines a kind of social situation in which the "anonymity continuum" outlined above does not hold, and in which a quite different pattern of shared temporality is allowed to appear. This essay and its significance are unfortunately neglected by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their appropriation and expansion of Schutz's thought, giving the "everyday world" of The Social Construction of Reality a kind of imperialism which is lacking in Schutz. More relevant to our topic, the entire theme of dual temporality, the modes of the duree and the already passed, seems to have been dropped by Berger and Luckmann; and it is the distinctive appearance of these modes which marks out the musical situation from the everyday world.

The sociality on which Schutz focuses in this essay is that peculiar form of the we-relationship which exists between the composer and the beholder, the latter including player, listener, and reader of music.l0 Schutz uses Western classical music as his model, in which the "composer" is assumed to be a specified person separated from the beholder. However, his analysis would also hold for a great many other musical situations and degrees of participation, as he himself admits. One distinctive feature of the musical we-relationship is that it need not be face to face, and is defined solely by "shared time" within the musical experience. The "shared time" refers here only to the lived present of

10 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, I964), p. 169.

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the duree, and is therefore not susceptible to typifications and objectifications within which the we-relationship ordinarily occurs. Such meaning structures are conceptual unities, and the distinction of music is that its "meaning structure is not capable of being expressed in conceptual terms." 11 Music is a counterbalance to Schutz's highly cognitive focus in Phenomenology of the Social World, and yet it would be entirely erroneous to think of it as merely "irrational." Instead of a cognitive structure based on acts of interpretation and typing, "the meaning of a musical work ... is essentially of a polythetical structure. It cannot be grasped monothetically. It consists in the articulated step-by-step occurrence in inner time, in the very polythetic constitutional process itself." 12 The "polythetical constitutional process" is a Husserlian notion; it can best be contrasted with the all-at-once grasping of meaning which is involved in apprehending " 2 x 2 = 4." The implication is that a musical work, as polythetical, cannot be so grasped. It cannot be "summarized" but is comprehended only through performance. The performance consists of a re-creation, a reconstitution by the beholder, of the polythetic step-by-step structure of the composer. "Although separated by hundreds of years, the [beholder] participates with quasi simultaneity in the [composer's] stream of consciousness by performing with him, step by step, the on- going articulation of his musical thought. The beholder, thus, is united with the composer by a time dimension common to both, which is nothing other than a derived form of the vivid present shared by the partners in a genuine face-to-face relation." 13

This "shared time" can be distinguished from that of the ordinary we-relationship in two ways. First, it permits a beholder to "grow older together" with a composer whom everyday reality consigns to the world of predecessors, a world in principle unavailable for such

possibilities. Second, the shared time of musical performance is, unlike that of the ordinary we-relationship, not liable to be confused with "clock time," objectified time-as-passed upon which the world of ideal types depends. Schutz is very insistent on this point. The number of minutes which a certain symphony takes to be performed "is a fact which might possibly interest the program maker of a broadcasting station. To the beholder it means nothing." 14 Objectified time is

11 Ibid., p. I59. 12 Ibid., p. 172. 13 Ibid., p. 171. 14 Ibid.

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spatialized time and is thus distinct from the inner duration in which all growing older together occurs.

Thus, Schutz's analysis of the musical relationship of "growing older together" unites the three terms which were our starting point: temporality, becoming contemporary, and performance. Performance, however, is no longer an empty category; it consists of just that step-by- step reconstituting which defines the polythetical meaning structure. This performance is in the mode of the duree, and indeed is to be understood as tied to a special temporality. For Schutz, this is necessarily a shared experience, and it is at this point that what psychology can contribute to an understanding of "mutuality" becomes relevant. Schutz's own concept of the "we-relationship" is very much a formal structure, and the writings of Erikson provide one way to understand it as a category underlying actual human developmental processes. It is this emphasis which can help put the rather marginal situation of making music into the center of human experience.

II. ERIKSON: MUTUALITY, IDENTITY, AND TEMPORAL

ORDERING

For Schutz (as for Eliade) the shared temporality of musical performance remains an extraordinary experience, and he does not discuss the implications of this for one's return to the everyday world. Nor does he suggest that the musical we-relationship might serve any generalized function such as setting a limit to the claims of the anonymous "they" world of clock time. A possible supplement to Schutz's thinking about the we-relationship and its place within the social world is to be found within the writings of Erik Erikson. As a thinker in the Freudian tradition, Erikson's thought could bring to phenomenological perspective three important aspects which Schutz does not stress.

First, Eriksonian man is embodied. This is evident in his famous chart (in Childhood and Society) 15 of " body modes" of world-relatedness; these modes are also models of sexual orientation harking back to Freud's three "stages," the original inspiration for Erikson's chart. In contrast with Schutz, it is inconceivable that Erikson would write the following sentence: "Since the Thou also performs intentional Acts, it also bestows meaning."16 One encounters another human

15 Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963), p. 89.

16 Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, p. 98.

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being as male or female, but never as it; this fact has relevance for Erikson in a way that it simply doesn't for Schutz.

Second, the tradition of psychoanalytic thought replaces ontological or structural "primordiality" with chronological "origins" within the human life cycle. Whatever other implications this may have, the focus on development within psychoanalytic thought necessitates a concrete "we-relationship"-that is, the family, or even just the mother-infant relationship-as a particular model for all subsequent relationships. Instead of structurally prior versus derivative, Erikson's Freudian background dichotomizes between the family and the early stages of childhood, on one hand, and the "secondary" relationships involving cultural institutions, on the other. This becomes a particularly crucial aspect of Erikson's thought, but there is certainly no need to debate the role of the family as the "privileged" example" of social reality within all psychoanalytically based theory.

Erikson typifies a third feature of Freudian tradition, moreover: conceptualizing human development as a series of conflicts and resolutions, he is most interesting and eloquent when he focuses on "what can go wrong." In contrast with Piaget's theory of childhood play (to cite one glaring example), Erikson views play as a means toward solving conflicts, and only secondarily as intrinsically enjoyable (see the "Toys and Reasons" chapter in Childhood and Society). The result of this emphasis on neurosis, interpreted as a failure to resolve childhood conflicts, has traditionally been a very precarious view of adult strength and sanity on the part of psychoanalysis. This is by no means as dominant a theme in Erikson as it was for Freud,17 but for both, lived reality is a precarious construction, something one must work at to attain. Although similar to Schutz in this notion of reality as a construction, an achievement, Erikson's tradition, and his own formulations, make it much easier to see identity diffusion, or failed mutuality, than the positive cases of each.

The writings of Erikson can be used to help expand Schutz's analysis of the musical situation into a general framework for relating it to the everyday world. Schutz explicitly separated his own undertaking from that of transcendental phenomenology proper (i.e., from Husserl's project) and focused on the structures of social life exhibited within the natural attitude. The separation between the intentionalities of the transcendental ego and all psychologizing-a distinction which

17 Erikson himself tries to overcome this; see "Human Strength and the Cycle of Generations," in Insight and Responsibility (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., I964).

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Husserl vehemently maintained-would therefore not seem to extend to relating psychological materials to Schutz. Therefore, I would explicitly deny that Schutz is here to provide a "grounding" for Eriksonian thought in the philosophical sense in which Husserl hoped his own "transcendental egology" would be a grounding for the positive sciences, including psychology.18 Nor will I resort to Schutz's own duality of "everyday world" and "social science" to explicate how Erikson's thought interrelates Freud's metapsychology with its "scientific" structure, with intuitions drawn from a variety of other "worlds"-as in the "Eight Ages of Man" essay with its Shake- spearian base. One of the problems with Eriksonian thought is that it does presuppose a much greater reciprocity between everyday reality and "social science" than does psychology which leans toward mathematical models and exact formal structures.19 Here, however, I intend only to show that his account of mutuality and identity is structurally similar to that of Schutz, and that Eriksonian formulations can often be expressed in Schutzian terminology.

In order to tap the range of Erikson's work and influence, I will discuss his constructs as they arise within his general developmental schema, and then turn to an extremely concrete and fascinating study done by William Henry and John Sims, which aimed to test the coherence and validity of the Eriksonian construct of "identity diffusion" and thus of "identity" as its opposite. Focusing still further, I will examine a bit of data from this study-the Thematic Apper- ception Test record of one of the subjects-in order to encounter in the living imagination of the contemporary person those same inter- relations of temporality, mutuality, and performance with which we were confronted in our initial passage from Eliade.

A. The Life Stages and Temporality

The best presentation of Erikson's "life stages" is found in the pre- viously mentioned "Eight Ages of Man" chapter in Childhood and Society. However, he has expanded on the various analogies and meanings implicit in the stages of development in at least two other essays: "Human Strength and the Cycle of Generations" and "Psycho-

18 Edmund Husserl, "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science," in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965). 19 Erikson discusses such reciprocity, or so it seems, in his essay on Freud, "The First Psychoanalyst," in Insight and Responsibility.

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logical Reality and Historical Actuality." Underlying all these writings is the belief that human existence can be viewed simultaneously as the development of an individual living through his life history and as a series of mutualities which unite men with each other, generation with generation, and man with cosmos. These mutualities form our "( actuality," the "world of participation, shared with other participants with a minimum of defensive maneuvering and a maximum of mutual activation." 20 Each life stage is a mode of such activation, and several of the stages are explicitly based on the successful establishment of mutuality with others.

However, the life stages of earliest childhood are roughly derived from Freud's celebrated progression of oral, anal, and phallic stages, and Erikson is very insistent on retaining the bodily, biological grounding for emotional development. But Erikson, focusing on mutuality, must account for the biological development and bodily orientation not only of the individual but of the partner in the mutuality of coparticipation. Freudian perspective, as we mentioned, gives the family a privileged place as the first locus of consciousness, experience, and relatedness. But Freud saw the family via the child's development, or rather, by means of the reconstructed childhood of adult neurotics. Erikson does not totally alter this view, but he does make a significant attempt to bring the parent's biologically based orientation into the picture. Thus, the baby is dependent, receptive, and "oral" in that mutuality is established through feeding, overcoming the anxieties of helplessness and establishing (one hopes) a sense of basic trust which remains with the individual throughout life.21 The mother is, however, a partner in a situation of mutual activation, and "biological motherhood needs at least three links with social experience: the mother's past experience of being mothered; a conception of motherhood shared with trustworthy contemporary surroundings; and an all-enveloping world-image tying past, present and future into a continuing pattern of providence."22 The establishment of a successful relationship with another is referred to in psychoanalytic terminology as "object love," and this crass-sounding expression contains an implicit recognition that links this first relationship of infancy with the first experience of an "object" insofar as the infant has "the ability to perceive the enduring quality of the thing world. . . the experience of the care-taking

20 Erikson, Insight and Responsibility, p. I65. 21 Erikson, Childhood and Society, pp. 248-49. 22 Erikson, Insight and Responsibility, p. I 16.

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person as a coherent being, who reciprocates one's physical and emotional needs in expectable ways and therefore deserves to be endowed with trust."23 As for Schutz, then, the we-relationship between living people becomes the ground for our experience of everydayness insofar as this is a question of taking for granted the stability of predictability of schemas and structures within this world. This original-for Erikson, chronologically prior in the life of the individual-form of verification is implicitly reactualized in all later mutuality, first within the family, then by means of various secondary settings within the culture. The

special "secondary settings" in which the mutuality of earliest trust is reestablished and reconfirmed most explicitly are at the "stages" of identity, intimacy, and generativity.

Growth for the Eriksonian person is understood in three interrelated but differing ways.

a) The individual lives his own life history, "growing older" from trust in infancy through wisdom and integrity in old age. A failure to resolve the conflict of any stage is a disturbance in one's relationship to one's own future.24

b) The individual experiences an expanding series of mutualities, "growing older together" first in the mother-child relationship, then with peers, and finally through parenthood, to the establishment of mutuality with the next generation. The "world of successors" is for Erikson a world of one's own and other people's children.

c) At each stage, the individual also recapitulates elements of his own past. For example, trust is reaffirmed in the identity stage, taking on the form of "loyalty" to a particular ideological structure or role which one has adopted for one's own. Unsolved conflicts of earlier

stages reerupt and are reenacted in the world of the adolescent.25 Erikson's theory of cultural institutions is that these provide not only

role models but resources to overcome such remnants of childhood conflicts. The "childish" element in religion, its regressive focus on

dependency and submissiveness, is seen by Erikson as an attempt to express universal, archaic modes of being at a communal and symbolic level, recapitulating and reaffirming the infantile attitude of trust. In such a reenactment, trust is maintained in relation to the wider structures of community and cosmos, and the ambiguity of the original

23 Ibid., p. 17. 24 In Childhood and Society (p. 67), he makes this point by comparing neurotic

fixation to "a phonograph record with a faulty groove." 25 Ibid., p. 26i.

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trust relationship is overcome.26 However, in a case where earlier

experience had failed to establish firm trust in others and the world, such a resolution through institutionalized reenactment, in a "second-

ary setting," would be precarious. Identity as a stage is more difficult to achieve in a society where the

role models for adults, available to members of the society, are somehow

inadequate or unsatisfactory in relation to inner need, or where there are just too many options at once. Erikson's most well-known writings deal with this problem, and many studies of contemporary youth are based on this notion of "identity" (Keniston's The Uncommitted is an excellent example). A positive failure to achieve identity, identity diffusion or "role confusion" is tied not only to vocational models but also to the possibility of being able to achieve lasting intimacy, for which one needs a sense of continuity, an assurance about being and

remaining oneself. It is important to mention that the reasons for not

being able to cement one's identity are to be sought in the individual's life experiences as a child, as well as conditioning cultural factors. This is a different position from that of Allen Wheelis, who in The Quest

for Identity seems to ascribe a direct causal relation between factors such as rapid social change and a breakdown in identity. Actually, Wheelis's definition of "identity" is quite different from Erikson's, for it relies much more heavily on the Freudian construct of the super ego as the "mainstay" of identity and sociality.27 However, I mention Wheelis here because his principle argument is that psychoanalysis has no power to "cure" identity diffusion-since Freud's method offers no superego supports and "could uncover an identity provided such were hidden, but cannot create one that is lacking."28 Oddly enough, many of Wheelis's patients, on whom he based this unhappy conclusion, belonged to the same subgroup from which the Henry and Sims study originated, a group of people for whom failure to achieve

identity took on a special sense: professional actors.

B. "Identity Difusion" and Distrust of Time: The Study of Actors

The Eriksonian concept of "identity" is one point in which mutuality, performance, and temporal ordering all play an extremely central

part. In order to illustrate exactly how Erikson's thought can shed

light on the relations between these three themes, we can look at the

26 Ibid., p. 250. 27 Alien Wheelis, The Quest for Identity (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., I95 8), p. 99. 28 Ibid., p. 73.

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study conducted by Henry and Sims, and reported briefly in Trans- Action (September I970) as "Actors' Search for Self." We can see how for one group of people, problems with identity also presupposed problems with time and mutuality which became actualized in terms of performance. In this study by Henry and Sims, Erikson's concept of "identity diffusion" is investigated in terms of its coherence and validity. Because of the peculiarly negative focus of psychoanalytic thought, it was much easier to investigate diffusion than successfully completed identity formation, since one can ask the question, "What

group of people seem to have a persisting problem with 'identity'?" and then proceed to use this group as subjects for a study of unresolved conflict at this developmental level. The success of this method does not depend on comparing a sample with a control group, but only on isolating a sample and determining its characteristics in regard to some particular problem. Other people can have problems relating to identity (college students, hospitalized psychiatric patients), but, as we recall, Eriksonian identity is closely tied to vocational choice, and actors embody this facet of the construct particularly clearly. Moreover, the advantage of using a nonhospitalized population is that one presupposes a certain degree of social adaptation in spite of identity failure. The subjects of the "identity" study all aimed at becoming "professionals," and no matter what their other problems were, their ability to work at their acting remained unimpaired.29

The main features of "identity diffusion" prominently include a lack of intimacy and "time diffusion." Since identity presupposes a firm ability for mutuality and reciprocity, the lack of identity implies an inability to "grow older together" in the Eriksonian sense of engaging in a successful pattern of mutual activation. Since sexual role is one very important aspect of identity, the corresponding form of sexuality in the case of "failed identity" is either isolation or "frenetic and unsatisfactory attempts at intimacy with inappropriate partners." 30 "Time diffusion" is described as follows: "The inability to maintain

29 For this very reason, many of the cases described by existential psychologists such as Binswanger and Eugene Minkowski seem to be curiously deficient in all attempts to deal with the subjects' sociality. None of Minkowski's patients described in Lived Time (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, I970) was working when he confronted them, and the majority were hospitalized. I mention this only to suggest that the present discussion of temporality might conceivably be understood in relation to work such as Minkowski's.

30 William Henry and John Sims, "Actors' Search for a Self," Trans-Action (Sep- tember 1970), p. 60.

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perspective and expectancy; a distrust of waiting, hoping, planning, of one's relationship to the future; a disregard for time as a dimension for organizing one's life."31 Why should this be an important and fundamental characteristic of the behavior of the identity-diffused person ? Eriksonian temporality is based on mutuality between persons as the foundation of all "objectified" continuities and stabilities; within the earliest trust is an implicit futurity, and with each successful conflict stage resolved, the past is recreated and reinterpreted. In Schutzian language, "growing older together" (in the original experience of mutuality) is the living experience out of which all "objectified" continuities and stabilities in clock time begin. To live comfortably within even the clock time of the everyday world, one needs to have developed the ability to share inner time with another.

The reported results of the Henry and Sims study do indeed show that actors and actresses share a coherent set of measurable characteristics corresponding to Erikson's notion of identity diffusion, with the possible exception of "industry diffusion" (if anything, their industry was overconcentrated in relation to their demanding and difficult careers). "Actors are people whose early lives have been marked by disjunctive experiences ... leaving each of [them] with the sense of a quest in search for the one life style appropriate to them. We think that the role experimentation so begun and subsequently institutionalized in acting, becomes the modus vivendi that has meaning for them." 32

It is this "institutionalization" which allows the performance lives of the actors to complete their existences in the everyday world. For actors, there is even evidence that the very process of rehearsal and performance seems to lower the level of identity diffusion, as they "settle into their roles" over a period of a few weeks.33

In order to further concretize the relationships between mutuality and time diffusion, and tie them to a notion of performance, I wish to turn to a bit of data from the Henry and Sims study, the Thematic Apperception Test protocol of one of the subjects. The TAT, a standard instrument for psychological research, is usually described as a "pro- jective technique" and a test of "fantasy." 34 It consists of a standard

31 Ibid., p. 6o. 32 Ibid., p. 62. 33 Ibid. 34 The TAT was developed by Henry Murray and associates, doing research on

"normal" personalities at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. Its uses, and the system for administration and scoring, are described in Murray's Thematic Apperception Test Manual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I943).

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set of pictures, to each of which the subject is asked to tell a story. Now, a story implies something more than a description, and very often the tester will prod the subject with such questions as "What's

happening in the picture?" or "How will it all turn out?" The

implication is that in order to tell a story one must be able to construct an imaginative sequence in which a "now" portrayed in the picture is meaningfully related to both a past and a future. "Time diffusion" can be seen when the response does not take the form of a "story," or when the storyteller shows confusion in relating past, present, and future in the context of meaningful action which he is describing. Since the test situation itself presupposes a face-to-face relation between administrator and subject, and since many of the TAT pictures are

specifically designed to elicit responses centering on interpersonal relations, one may say that a sort of mutuality is equally built into the TAT. The professional actress whose record we will examine illustrated a variety of such interpersonal stories, as well as a fascinating example of "time diffusion" and a large sample of references to performance. It should be mentioned that she was judged to be one of the more extreme cases of "identity diffusion" within the sample.

Here is one of her stories (told to a picture which is usually seen as a father-son dialogue); we see the "face-to-face" element of all mutuality literalized so that the theme of distrust is expressed by interpreting one character as concretely " two-faced." The opening remark is presumably addressed to the tester, although it seems to blend naturally into the context of the story she tells.

What a sour look on your face. This is a father and son. The son has had all sorts of current disappointments and setbacks, and is a little bitter about it. And the father is trying ostensibly on the surface to comfort the son, telling him not to worry, it happens to everybody; on the other hand, he's gloating over the fact that the son is having it so easy. On this side of his face (the right-hand side, as you look at the picture) he's supporting. And on this side, he's saying, "Oh, you thought it was so easy. I had to work for a living and it wasn't so easy." Now for a resolution to this I don't know what to say is going to happen. Well, the boy will go on struggling, realizing that he cannot find the kind of understanding from his father that he had hoped for, and the father will from a distance watch his son's life and career going from this point with an ambivalent feeling of rooting for him on the one hand and being grateful for his failures on the other. [Card 7BM]

Such a we-relationship as she depicts is disturbed in its very face-to-

faceness, in that an attunement to such a two-faced other would not

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constitute a shared experience in which meaning could be created. In this case, the "missed mutuality" is thoroughly in keeping with the fascination of actors with "the problems of using oneself as the artistic medium" 35 and a preoccupation with gesture and facial expression.

The element of missed mutuality pervades her stories to pictures which portray explicitly heterosexual scenes. Since sexual intimacy is an area of conflict for those high in identity diffusion, the stories our

subject tells are especially revealing. Two are described by her as "actors doing a scene"-that is as a performance. In one case, the participants are described as uninterested in the scene they're rehearsing, who "got into the movies by selling their outside." Their off-stage lives are described as meaningless and filled with instability.36

A card portraying a man and a woman embracing, identified by her as a scene from a play, elicits the following: "In spite of my suspi- cions about all that went around this moment-have the feeling of mutual comfort in this scene." She then switches to considering it as an actual moment in lived time, and the couple become a husband and wife, who have "been married forever, and have had all sorts of difficulties, but this is a moment of temporary reconciliation and comfort. And in the future they will go on having conflicts but every once in a while they'll come back to this moment. And their ability to do this will keep them together. But he'll always be the difficult one" (card o). This last story expresses perhaps the most positive view of interpersonal relations in the entire set. The central characters of her other stories become homosexual, contemplate suicide, and "die very lonely and withdrawn." In the "happy couple" story, it is the "moment" portrayed in the picture which makes their marriage bearable, and their happiness is said to depend on their capacity to return to it.

What is the relationship for the subject between this "moment" and the temporal structure of her existence? The "moment" appears

35 Henry and Sims, p. 59. 36 This story is told to Card 4, described in Murray's Manual as: "A woman is

clutching the shoulders of a man whose face and body are averted as if he were trying to pull away from her." The complete story given by our subject goes: " There's Linda Darnell. Reminds me of a movie I saw called 'Pinkie.' Just reminds me of a movie. These are movie actors doing a scene. They make their career on their looks and they don't give themselves credit for the great human beings that they are. So they get into the movies by selling their outside. They're not terribly interested in the scene they're doing now, and later on in their careers they're going to be very unhappy. After many husbands she will try to kill herself. After many wives he will take to drinking, if he isn't already drinking."

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much more dramatically in still another story, told to a picture of a little boy looking at a violin.

This picture reminds me of the story of Yehudi Menuhin. He was a child

prodigy, and then when he grew up he had to find out how to play technically what he had just played instinctively as a child. So, the story I would tell- This is a child prodigy and the violin. This catches him in a moment before he knows what's going to happen in the way of the difficulty, but there's that kind of-sometimes you see the whole of life, your own and everyone else's in a moment and he's dimly aware of what's to come, but not very conscious here, just kind of vague, he sees the mystery of it all. And he'll

grow up to be Yehudi Menuhin and will have to struggle to learn how to do it all over again. [Card I]

Here we can speak of temporal diffusion on several levels. Most

obviously, the "plot" is contained in the first two sentences, and

repeated without elaboration later on. But far more powerful is the

temporality of Yehudi Menuhin's life, as the storyteller understands it. Instead of a meaningful Eriksonian progression from childhood

through identity to the completion of the life history, the adulthood of the hero is pictured as a painful repetition of childhood activity. He must "struggle to learn how to do it all over again" rather than

doing anything new. Performance is a repetitious effort, an unending attempt to recreate a childhood which is never overcome; Menuhin, like the storyteller herself, is stuck on the "identity treadmill" and does not "grow older" in the Eriksonian sense. It would be interesting to consider Yehudi Menuhin as an actor's archetype, a figure whose

history became mythicized for this group of people (according to

Henry, this is why he appears so frequently in actors' fantasies in

just this way). So far, much of what we have seen in this woman's fantasies is

directly "translatable" into the Schutzian categories of temporality, mutuality, and performance. Such a translation becomes feasible when one agrees that the actors' performance is, like the musician's, the

step-by-step participation in an unfolding polythetic structure of

meaning. The meaning structures involved in acting and rehearsing are not subject to the process of objectification and typification, any more than a musical theme could be summarized and grasped mono-

thetically. However, like a musical work, a script is also a product, and therefore can be viewed (from the outside) as an objectification in

spatialized time, although the temporality in which the performance occurs must be that of the duree, the lived present.

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However, musical performance involved "growing older together" as a relationship between beholder and composer, and among the beholders. Since it is impossible for the actors in their off-stage lives to achieve the kind of trust and intimacy necessary for real " mutuality," the Schutzian "shared time" on stage becomes a kind of substitute, and, as in the TAT story, heterosexual mutuality is transformed into "two actors doing a scene." Unfortunately, the performance situation, when used in this way, is in itself not capable of altering the overall

impression of fakeness and futility, and no lasting mutuality is trans- ferred from the stage scene to the rest of life. As for "distrust of time," its origin lies in the disturbance of the basic forms of mutuality, the

grounding of the we-relationship understood as a "growing older

together." The inability to use clock time as a field of planning is a derivative of this missed mutuality in the mode of the duree, just as the performance situation becomes an attempt to recapture the shaped duree through we-relationships on stage.

In the Yehudi Menuhin story, we find two temporal modes in

sharpest contrast which do not seem to correspond to the Schutzian duree or to the clock time of the world of typifications. Virtually all duration is set aside in the "moment" in which both past and present become transparent, and the subject senses "the mystery of it all." This comes much closer to the specifically Eliadian transcendence of "the terror of history" (which expresses an understanding of duration as a realm of meaningless suffering) through the moment of the Eternal Present in which all profane time is abolished.37 For both Eliade and the actress, even the Schutzian "growing older

together" in shared simultaneity appears to collapse.

III. RELIGION AND THE MODES OF TEMPORALITY

How can our understandings of temporality, mutuality, and the polythetical meaning construction which I have called "performance" be related to Eliade's analysis of the modern situation ? In order to do

this, I believe that one must admit along with Schutz, that any "performance" is a step-by-step unfolding, an event in shared time. This means that there is no way to talk of an action of this sort occurring completely atemporally, and although the phenomenological method

might demand that one place objectified spatialized time "in brackets," one is still forced to accept the duree, the internal time-consciousness,

37 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History (New York: Harper & Row, I959), p. I5I.

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as indubitable.38 In short, a Schutzian perspective would insist that Eliade is simply not being phenomenologically correct if he refuses to acknowledge that even "sacred time" involves some form of duration. Eliade himself has taken one step in this direction in his essay "Two Types of Primordiality"39 but not for the reasons we suggest are necessary. It is not relevant here to discuss or attempt to guess what the exact relation between phenomenology of religion and philosophical phenomenology is, but it can be assumed that Eliade's terminology is at this point not under the direct influence of the latter movement. One could then imagine the possibility of taking Eliade's writings as Schutz took Weber's, and giving them a systematic phenomenological grounding.

The Henry and Sims study seems to offer a view of "identity diffusion "which could lead to a specification of "identity" entailing other patterns of temporal structuring and uses of performance. However, one could question the negative focus of Erikson's theory, and plausibly allow that actors-instead of being identity "failures"-have managed to construct identities bypassing both the Eriksonian model and the "superego" types of identity recognized by Wheelis. Through their expensive use of performance structures, actors have epitomized a notion of identity as a precarious process, rather than a stable given. If this is a more appropriate formulation, one may hazard a guess as to why these same people are now such central figures in American self-consciousness, and no longer a despised class (this assumes that the psychosocial gratifications of professional acting have remained relatively constant). As older, more "superego-based" identities are no longer feasible, modern people have become, for better or worse, more open to a view of identity as a project which might continue almost indefinitely, and of which actors are perhaps only an extreme example. Certainly this view allows one to see what is obvious from any issue of True Screen Romances-namely, that the actor's "search for self" is the focus of widespread interest. According to this view of identity, which is what psychologists such as Lifton and Rieff40 have proposed, our own use of "entertainment" (institutionalized performance) may be more similar to that of archaic societies than Eliade

38 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 28. 39 Mircea Eliade, The Quest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I969). 40 Lifton's "Protean Style" is explicated in "Woman as Knower: Some Psycho-

historical Perspectives," in The Woman in America (Boston: Beacon Press, I967). Rieff's "psychological man" appears at the end of Freud: The Mind of the Moralists (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., I96I).

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(for one) has realized. For him, as for many thinkers, the tendency of archaic societies to consider every significant action as a pattern of performance has led to the belief that in such actions the real "identities" of the participants are expressed. The corollary assumption has been that for us things are different. In actual fact, most psychologists involved in anthropological research have been impressed by the wide variety of personality patterns and individual identities in even the most traditional societies. Moreover, although both play and fantasy have become important constructs for psychology, their institutionalization as "entertainment" has rarely attracted the student of religion except as examples of "secularization." One could imagine an analysis of the religious meanings of the relations among the script writer as provider of stage identity, the actor as performer, and the audience as cobeholders, without necessarily resorting to various notions such as "degeneration" or "secularization."

Finally, it would appear that both Schutz and Erikson not only assume but stress that contemporary people know another kind of time, other than time spatialized and objectified (clock time, Eliade's profane time). Nor does Eliade himself deny this when it suits him: "Man is also aware of several temporal rhythms, and not only of historical time. He has only to listen to good music, to fall in love, or to pray, and he is out of the historical present, he reenters the eternal present of love and of religion. Even to open a novel, or to attend a dramatic performance, may be enough to transport a man into another rhythm of time-what might call "condensed time"- which is anyhow not historical time."41 What all three seem to assume is that only a non-ordinary form of temporality could possibly have religious meaning, although Schutz's analysis of performance leaves open the possibility that any nonspatialized, non-objectifiable temporality which might become the occasion for such a performance situation might have such meaning. It is these assumptions which seem, paradoxically, to be themselves products of a peculiarly twentieth-century experience with time, and perhaps with the social world itself. This experience involves not only a dichotomy between the standard time of the everyday world, and the "inner" time of the we-relationship, but also the precarious attempt to overcome the general domination over the latter by clock time, and the world of the "they" over the simultaneity of the "we-relationship." But Erikson and Schutz rescue the "we-

relationship" by showing its primordiality over objectified "reality." 41 Eliade, Images and Symbols, p. 33.

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The actress, in her TAT stories, uses a "moment" of inner reality to transcend the ordinary world of relatively meaningless and unhappy occurrences. The curious split between inner duree and spatialized temporality has taken many forms-for example, science fiction stories of time travel-but even writers as diverse as those we have discussed seem to share it, as well as an intensified emphasis on the recovery of the duree and the we-relationships. Could this be an attempt to insure that "growing older together" in non-everyday performance remains a permanent human possibility, available to contemporaries as well as to archaic man, who became truly himself in shared temporality with his gods and heroes? Perhaps "religion" should not be "located" in a particular style of temporal ordering-the return to illo tempore-or even within a non-everyday temporality apart from spatialized standard time, but rather defined in part by how a particular culture experiences time, how it attempts to encompass even two extremely dichotomized forms of temporal ordering into a meaningful social world which human beings have not only constructed but within which they must continue to live.

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Growing Older Together Erik Erikson and Alfred Schultz

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