By Erik H. Erikson
From the cover: Many of the methods of civil disobedience so widely and so sporadically used today have their origin in Mahatma Gandhi’s militant nonviolence. In order to elucidate the nature of what Gandhi called his Truth in Action, Erikson sets out to retell in great detail a relatively little-known event in Gandhi’s middle years, namely, his assumption of leadership in a strike of textile workers in the city of Ahmedabad in 1918. Erikson explains Gandhi’s method of concentrating on local grievances of high symbolic value as a way of mobilizing the Indian masses both spiritually and politically — a method that distinguished Gandhi from the charismatic figures (Lenin, Wilson) of the post-World War I period…..Erikson counterpoints Freud’s insights into the nature of sexuality (and Gandhi’s disavowal of it) and Gandhi’s insights into the nature of armed violence (and Freud’s fatalism regarding it) and concludes that only a combination of these insights might give man some measure of mastery over his fatal alternation of repression and excess.
NY. W. W. Norton. 1969. 465p.