American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Erikson’s work on the problem of “identity formation” in young adults. A prolonged adolescence, Erikson argued, accompanied by “chronic malignant disturbance,” was sometimes an indication that an individual was having trouble shedding fragments of his personality that he finds undesirable. Seeking “whole-ness,” and yet fearing a threatened loss of identity, some young adults experience such a sense of rage that they strike out at others in arbitrary acts of destruction. Oppenheimer’s behavior and problems back in 1925–26 had conformed in significant ways to this thesis. He had thrown himself into theoretical physics, carving out for himself a robust identity. But the scars remained. As the physicist and science historian Gerald Holton has observed, “Some psychological damage remained, however, not least a vulnerability that ran through his personality like a geological fault, to be revealed at the next earthquake.”