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women, the chasm between socialization and mature roles was greater and harder to bridge. To remember what it was like to be a child, being prepared for traditional roles in Iranian society, and then to violate those roles by analytic discussion was too painful. There were women who were skilled and analytic scholars, but their childhood memories were blurred and remote; they had adjusted to dissonance by forgetting. There were also articulate traditional women who delighted in recalling the vivid details of their childhoods, but could not dissect or compare. American women who matured before the women’s movement have the same kind of problem but to a lesser degree, for they have a far narrower chasm to bridge.
    I have not tried to verify these narratives, beyond attending to issues of internal consistency and checking them against my knowledge of the individuals The accounts as I heard them are themselves part of the process of composing lives. They are autobiographical, not biographical, shaped by each person’s choice and selective memory and by the circumstances of our work together No doubt they are shaped again by my own selections, resonating variously with my own experience. These are stories I have used to think with, sometimes quoting at length and sometimes very briefly, sometimes approaching an issue almost entirely through the eyes of one woman and at other times lining them all up for comparison.
    Storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning, whether we tell tales of the creation of the earth or of our own early choices. Each of these women is engaged in inventing a new kind of story. Not only is it impossible to know what the future holds for them, it is impossible to know what their memories of the past will be when they bring them out again in the future, in some new and changed context.
    The process of improvisation that goes into composing a life is compounded in the process of remembering a life, like a patchwork quilt in a watercolor painting, rumpled and evocative. Yet it is this second process, composing a life through memory as well as through day-to-day choices, that seems to me most essential to creative living. The past empowers the present, and the groping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

THREE
FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

    J OAN AND E RIK MARRIED IN 1931 IN V IENNA , where he was being trained by Anna Freud to be a child analyst. They came to the United States in 1933 and moved to the West Coast in 1939, where I first met them after the war. Erik became more and more involved in research and writing in addition to seeing patients, building on Freud’s theories of the origins of sexuality in childhood and the role of the ego in the healthy personality. His theory of the life cycle focused on the emergence of characteristic strengths through the resolution of developmental crises, from infancy, when children struggle for trust and will, to old age, when the danger is despair. During 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