Erikson and Rockwell: Museum Exhibit Coincides With Austen Riggs’ Centennial

“[W]hatever one may come to consider a truly American trait can be shown to have its equally characteristic opposite. … Most of her inhabitants are faced in their own lives … with alternatives presented by such polarities as open roads of immigration and jealous islands of tradition, outgoing internationalism and defiant isolationism, boisterous competition and self-effacing co-operation. …” —Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society

As America emerged from the Great Depression in the late 1930s and into the 1940s, the illustrations of Norman Rockwell reflected the country’s sense of itself—or how it wanted to see itself, whatever conflicts might have been roiling below the surface. In more than 140 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell conjured up an American ideal: pastoral, communal, whimsical.

But there was trouble outside the picture frame, and Rockwell and his wife left rural Vermont in 1953 for Stockbridge, Mass., where his wife entered treatment for depression and alcoholism at the Austen Riggs Center, on the town’s Main Street. There, Rockwell encountered Erik Erikson, then a clinician at Riggs, who would become Rockwell’s own therapist.

A serendipitous encounter if ever there was one: the immigrant therapist who would become famous for articulating the importance of identity and the “identity crisis” and the illustrator whose drawings and paintings evoked an idealized American image. Erikson and Rockwell, their work and their relationship, may be especially resonant today in an America riven by questions about identity and inclusion and the twin epidemics of opioid overdose and suicide—“diseases of despair” rooted in pervasive loneliness, disintegrating community bonds, and lost identity.

A remarkable exhibit, “Inspired: Rockwell and Erik Erikson,” at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, coincided last month with the centennial anniversary of the Austen Riggs Center, celebrated during a two-day conference titled “The Mental Health Crisis in America: Recognizing Problems, Working Toward Solutions.”

A broad theme emerging from that conference was that Erikson’s vision of personal identity rooted in relationships within the broader community is especially meaningful today; and that the Riggs treatment model based on intensive psychodynamic psychotherapy embedded in an open, entirely voluntary therapeutic community has something decisive to offer when the reigning focus on short-term crisis stabilization exhausts itself in failure (see story here).

“In the 1990s after the failure of the Clinton health care reform plan, there was rampant cost cutting by managed care,” Eric Plakun, M.D., medical director and CEO of Austen Riggs, said at the conference. “When managed care shifted the goal of treatment to mere crisis stabilization, there was a real question whether an institution like Riggs could survive. Under the leadership of Edward Shapiro [then medical director], we made a critical decision to remain true to our roots and our values. If we failed, we failed. If we survived, it would be because what we had to offer makes a difference.”

Riggs developed a continuum of care in response to the times, and it has survived and flourished. Plakun and others conference speakers acknowledged that what Austen Riggs offers is unusual in length and intensity of treatment, but the core values that have made the institution successful—patient authority, treatment that regards individuals as more than collections of symptoms, the importance of relationships, and a focus on understanding the meaning of symptoms—are “scalable,” capable of being translated to settings serving a broader public.

Psychiatric News thanks the Norman Rockwell Museum for its generous permission to reprint images.