In full Erik Homburger Erikson German-born American psychoanalyst
whose writings on social psychology, individual identity,
and the interactions of psychology with history, politics,
and culture influenced professional approaches to psychosocial
problems and attracted much popular interest.
As a young man, Erikson attended art school and traveled
around Europe. In 1927, when he was invited by the psychoanalyst
Anna Freud to teach art, history, and geography at a small
private school in Vienna, he entered psychoanalysis with
her and underwent training to become a psychoanalyst himself.
He became interested in the treatment of children and published
his first paper in 1930, before completing psychoanalytic
training and being elected to the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Institute in 1933. The same year, he emigrated to the United
States, where he practiced child psychoanalysis in Boston
and joined the faculty of the Harvard Medical School. He
became interested in studying the way the ego, or consciousness,
operates creatively in sane, well-ordered individuals.
Erikson left Harvard in 1936 to join the Institute of Human
Relations at Yale. Two years later he began his first studies
of cultural influences on psychological development, working
with Sioux Indian children at the Pine Ridge Reservation
in South Dakota. These studies, and later work with the
anthropologist Alfred Kroeber among the Yurok Indians of
northern California, eventually contributed to Erikson's
theory that all societies develop institutions to accommodate
personality development but that the typical solutions to
similar problems arrived at by different societies are different.
Erikson moved his clinical practice to San Francisco in
1939 and became professor of psychology at the University
of California, Berkeley, in 1942. During the 1940s he produced
the essays that were collected in Childhood and Society
(1950), the first major exposition of his views on psychosocial
development. The evocative work was edited by his wife,
Joan Serson Erikson. Erikson conceived eight stages of development,
each confronting the individual with its own psychosocial
demands, that continued into old age. Personality development,
according to Erikson, takes place through a series of crises
that must be overcome and internalized by the individual
in preparation for the next developmental stage.
Refusing to sign a loyalty oath required by the University
of California in 1950, Erikson resigned his post and that
year joined the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass.
He then returned to Harvard as a lecturer and professor
(1960–70) and professor emeritus (from 1970 until his
death).
In Young Man Luther (1958), Erikson combined his interest
in history and psychoanalytic theory to examine how Martin
Luther was able to break with the existing religious establishment
to create a new way of looking at the world. Gandhi's Truth
on the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969) also was a
psychohistory. In the 1970s Erikson examined modern ethical
and political problems, presenting his views in a collection
of essays, Life History and the Historical Moment (1975),
which links psychoanalysis to history, political science,
philosophy, and theology. His later works include The Life
Cycle Completed: A Review (1982) and Vital Involvement in
Old Age (1986), written with his wife and Helen Q. Kivnik.
A collection of papers, A Way of Looking at Things, edited
by Stephen Schlein, appeared in 1987.
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