220 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
Gandhi’s opportunity to work out conflict with authority figures—an opportunity
Gandhi was to have many times during his life.
Gandhi was born October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, India. As a young man, he
studied law in London and was inconspicuous in manner and appearance. Then,
dressed like a proper British subject, he returned to India to practice law. After
2 years of unsuccessful practice, he went to South Africa, which, like India, was
a British colony. He intended to remain for a year, but his first serious identity
crisis kept him there for more than 20 years.
A week after a judge excluded him from a courtroom, Gandhi was thrown
off a train when he refused to give up his seat to a “white” man. These two expe-
riences with racial prejudice changed Gandhi’s life. By the time he resolved this
identity crisis, his appearance had changed dramatically. No longer attired in silk
hat and black coat, he dressed in the cotton loincloth and shawl that were to
become familiar to millions of people throughout the world. During those years in
South Africa, he evolved the technique of passive resistance known as Satyagraha
and used it to solve his conflicts with authorities. Satyagraha is a Sanskirt term
meaning a tenacious, stubborn method of gathering the truth.
After returning to India, Gandhi experienced another identity crisis when, in
1918, at age 49, he became the central figure in a workers’ strike against the mill
owners at Ahmedabad. Erikson referred to the events surrounding the strike as
“The Event” and devoted the core of Gandhi’s Truth to this crisis. Although this
strike was only a minor event in the history of India and received only scant atten-
tion in Gandhi’s autobiography, Erikson (1969) saw it as having a great impact on
Gandhi’s identity as a practitioner of militant nonviolence.
The mill workers had pledged to strike if their demands for a 35% pay
increase were not met. But the owners, who had agreed among themselves to
offer no more than a 20% increase, locked out the workers and tried to break
their solidarity by offering the 20% increase to those who would come back to
work. Gandhi, the workers’ spokesperson, agonized over this impasse. Then,
somewhat impetuously, he pledged to eat no more food until the workers’
demands were met. This, the first of his 17 “fasts to the death,” was not under-
taken as a threat to the mill owners but to demonstrate to the workers that a
pledge must be kept. In fact, Gandhi feared that the mill owners might surrender
out of sympathy for him rather than from recognition of the workers’ desperate
plight. Indeed, on the third day, the workers and owners reached a compromise
that allowed both to save face—the workers would work one day for a 35%
increase, one day for a 20% increase, and then for whatever amount an arbitrator
decided. The next day Gandhi ended his hunger strike, but his passive resistance
had helped shape his identity and had given him a new tool for peaceful politi-
cal and social change.
Unlike neurotic individuals whose identity crises result in core pathologies,
Gandhi had developed strength from this and other crises. Erikson (1969) described
the difference between conflicts in great people, such as Gandhi, and psychologi-
cally disturbed people: “This, then, is the difference between a case history and a
life-history: patients, great or small, are increasingly debilitated by their inner con-
flicts, but in historical actuality inner conflict only adds an indispensable momen-
tum to all superhuman effort” (p. 363).