Composing a Life

those years, Joan was raising her three children, channeling her interests in the arts into projects she organized for them and at their schools—children’s art exhibits and Christmas pageants with real sheep for the shepherds. When her youngest, Sue, was ten, Joan enrolled herself and the children in a summer craft school and began learning the art and craft of jewelry making. Soon she was organizing an exchange among local craftspeople and establishing a regional arts center, a community context for individual creativity.
    In 1951, the Eriksons moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Erik worked at the Austen Riggs Psychiatric Center, primarily with adolescent patients. It was there that he developed the concept for which he is still most widely known of a crisis of identity occurring in adolescence or young adulthood. During that period, Joan, who had always participated in his struggles with theory, began working with patients for the first time, organizing an activities program that acquired capital letters and became an essential part of the institution.
    Joan is insistent that the Austen Riggs Activities Program is neither therapy nor entertainment. Not therapy, because the artists who work there do not interpret the symbolic meaning of patient work as therapists do, moving them toward explicit insight; instead they accept the work as valuable in its own right and help patients to develop their skills. Not entertainment, because the work provides a setting for addressing real tasks and accepting real challenges. Joan’s view is that art, like life, is founded on different kinds of strength, and that troubled young people can discover and develop strengths as they meet the challenges of giving concrete expression to their imaginations. “There’s a recapitulation of the stages of the life cycle whenever you go to do something, a picture for example. You have to have a certain basic trust that you can do this—you are going to do this. You have to have will, you have to have imagination enough and fancy enough to do it your way, to make it unique. You have to have confidence, identity, and so on.”
    An exploration of the ways women combine the materials of their lives must address this question of needed strengths, strength to imagine something new and strength to remain with it. For women moving out of traditional domesticity, creative energies are subverted not only by conflicting commitments but also by the steady drag of disparagement and prejudice pulling them toward the acceptance of subordinate roles. No one can expect, of course, to go through life without meeting discouragement and criticism, but every failure is more costly if it is accompanied by the implied message from outside, and the hidden belief within, that little more could have been expected. Those who move beyond discouragement are those who start out with a core of confidence and strength and who are lucky enough to continue to grow through environments that do not exploit the residual vulnerabilities everyone brings from childhood. All of the women I worked with on this project have had to deal with frustrations and with painful and costly choices and interruptions. Nevertheless, they have creatively reassembled the pieces again and again.
    There are plenty of casualties in the developmental process. Sometimes whole groups fail to thrive, while other groups or individuals grow up with a firm confidence in their own value and potential for achievement, making more of their lives as a result. In America today, while some minority communities can pass on an expectation of success, large numbers of black children grow up relegated to an expendable underclass; they place as little value on themselves and their potential achievements as does the society. The same is true of many Hispanics and descendents of the white migrants of the Dust Bowl days, some of whom remain rootless farm workers two generations later, still disparaged as “Okies” by others and even by themselves. Children who know they have few options open to them may daydream of being astronauts or movie stars, but nowhere in the dream is there a realistic and realistically imagined next step. Women also are only now beginning to break free of an ingrained and disabling sense of inferiority rooted in assumptions about the options available to them.
    Joan spoke one day about how she had arrived at her own clear identity as a dancer, an identity that has continued