Erikson underlie much of our understanding of human development. His insights into the interdependence of the individuals' growth and historical change, his now-famous concepts of identity, growth, and the life cycle, have changed the way we perceive ourselves and society. Widely read and cited, his works have won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.Combining the insights of clinical psychoanalysis with a new approach to cultural anthropology, Childhood and Society deals with the relationships between childhood training and cultural accomplishment, analyzing the infantile and the mature, the modern and the archaic elements in human motivation. It was hailed upon its first publication as "a rare and living combination of European and American thought in the human sciences" (Margaret Mead, The American Scholar). Translated into numerous foreign languages, it has gone on to become a classic in the study of the social significance of childhood.

    In this classic work a noted psychoanalyst assesses the persistent tension between traditional religion and the underlying philosophy of psychoanalysis, which many believe regards the satisfaction of instinctive and material wishes as the sole aim of life.

    

    Leon explains how in times of social crisis renewed Jew-hatred is incited by the capitalists to mobilize reactionary forces against the labor movement and disorient the middle classes and layers of working people about the true source of their impoverishment.

    It includes the vocabulary of "crooks, criminals, racketeers, beggars, tramps, convicts and the commercial underworld, the drug traffic, the white slave traffic and spivs", gathered from many countries and from obscure sources.