Ananda Paranjpe's account of Skinner and Erikson at Harvard University 1966

 As I reached campus days before the Fall session started in 1966, I spent hours at the library in William James Hall, a 15 story tower which housed Skinner's lab and office and the Psychology Dept on the top couple floors while the offices of Erikson, Allport, Roger Brown and others were in the Social Relations Dept mostly on the 3rd floor.

 As the session had yet to begin, the cafeteria was not open, and I got some sandwiches for lunch from a food truck on the street. There I met a student also getting his lunch. In small talk I figured out that he was from the Psych Dept. In the entire year that followed, I never ever saw that student again. There was no connection between the Psychology Dept on top and "Soc Rel" dept on the 3rd floor. 

It is possible that I might have been riding the elevator with Skinner, but I never know who he was. Someone told me that Jerome Bruner was the only "amphibian" going between the two separate domains! I am sure Erikson and Allport were connected because Erikson told me that Allport was impressed with my work (as I had shown my data from my doctoral thesis to him). 

Cora DuBois, the well-known anthropologist, who had become one of my mentors, told me that she and Erik were friends since they both had been young members of Henry Murray's clinical seminar long time back. Toward the end of the academic year a friend of mine, a post doc in urbanology asked me about Skinner drawing a blank. He dragged me to a visit to the top floor where we saw Skinner's pigeons pecking as they were all harnessed as each peck was recorded on a counter. 

Forward to 1975 some eight years after my post-doc with Erikson, I met him during his retirement home a Tiburon north of San Francisco. In the course of a long conversation when I told him about my impressions of self as conceived in Yoga, I incidentally mentioned also that I was reading Skinner's books. He could not understand why on earth I would read Skinner!