Erik Erikson 1902-94, American psychoanalyst, b. Germany. As a young man he traveled throughout Europe. He became a teacher in a Vienna private school and trained as a psychoanalyst (1927-33) under Anna Freud , specializing in child psychology. After emigrating to the United States in 1933, Erikson taught at Harvard (1933-36; 1960-70) and engaged in a variety of clinical work, widening the scope of psychoanalytic theory to take greater account of social, cultural, and other environmental factors. In his most influential work, Childhood and Society (1950), he divided the human life cycle into eight psychosocial stages of development. His psychohistorical studies, Young Man Luther (1958) and Gandhi's Truth (1969; Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award), explore the convergence of personal development and social history. His later works deal with ethical concerns in the modern world.

Bibliography: See biography by L. J. Friedman (1999).

Erik Homburger Erikson

Erik Homburger Erikson (1902-1994) was a German-born American psychoanalyst and educator whose studies have perhaps contributed most to the understanding of the young.

On June 15, 1902, Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, of Danish parents. His widowed mother subsequently married the pediatrician Theodore Homburger. Erikson first studied painting in Germany and Italy. Later, he joined Peter Blos and Dorothy Burlingham, Anna Freud's colleague, in the development of a small children's school in Vienna. This led to his training analysis by Anna Freud and immersion in theoretical seminars and in clinical work. Having also acquired a Montessori diploma, he graduated from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1933.

In 1930, he had married Canadian-born Joan Mowat Serson, who was vitally interested in education, as well as the arts and crafts, and deeply shared his interest in writing. The development of their three children, Kai, Jon, and Sue, as well as Erikson's work in Anna Freud's school, may have contributed much to his eventual thinking about the "epigenetic schema" of development and the vocabulary of health, in which he described the contributions of successive psychosexual stages to ego strengths, such as trust and autonomy, initiative and industry, and identity and intimacy.

Following Hitler's accession to power, the Eriksons went to the United States, where he began private practice and a sequence of research appointments at Harvard Medical School (1934-1935), Yale School of Medicine (1936-1939), University of California at Berkeley (1939-1951), and Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Mass. (1951-1960); he was visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (1951-1960). One of his later appointments was as professor of human development and lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard University. At intervals he took time off for work abroad, such as travel to India in connection with his intensive study of Gandhi.

Study of Youth

Always free from the provincialism typical of thinkers with a more static and limited background, Erikson's thinking pushed toward an understanding of the ways in which the drives dominant in successive psychoanalytically defined life stages are shaped by interaction with the persistent needs and solutions typical of a given culture. These formulations were supported by field observations made with the collaboration of anthropologists, and also by observations of children's play.

Erikson's extension of the classical Freudian psychoanalytic concept of development was published in Childhood and Society (1950). The book startled some orthodox Freudians, who viewed development as dominated solely by the sequential emergence of successively potent drives modified or exaggerated primarily by their intimate—depriving, indulging, or punishing—interactions with the parents. Erikson's broader concept of dynamics of inner-outer interactions provided inspiration, challenge, and insight to the spectrum of American social sciences concerned with child development.

Erikson's concern at Austen Riggs Center was focused on the troubled years of late adolescence and early adulthood. He emphasized the universal process of resolution of identity conflicts during this developmental phase in a profound study of the youthful Martin Luther, Young Man Luther (1958); in a monograph, Identity and the Life Cycle (1959); and in a volume which he edited, Youth: Change and Challenge (1963). His Harvard teaching and response to students' concerns with values led to two collections of essays: Insight and Responsibility (1964) and Identity, Youth and Crisis (1967). The latter is a prophetic reformulation of the relation of the concepts of ego and self, and recognition of issues of nobility and cowardice, love and hate, and greatness and pettiness, which he sees as transcending the traditional normative issues of "adjustment to society." His contribution to understanding of the problem of identity in youth at times when personal change intersects with historical change has led scores of scholars to research exploring this area. In 1969 Erikson published Gandhi's Truth. This book focuses on the evolution of a passionate commitment in maturity to a humane goal and on the inner dynamic precursors of Gandhi's nonviolent strategy to reach this goal.

Erikson's Personality

The sources of Erikson's fresh, subtle, and multimodal awareness are many: His artist's temperament and perceptiveness contribute both to sensory richness and to sensitivity to nuances of personality and behavior. His deeply satisfying family life and wide-ranging friendships, with people such as Lawrence K. Frank, Margaret Mead, A. L. Kroeber, and Gardner Murphy, support a sense of health as a potential for the development of human beings struggling with conflicts exacerbated by the pressures of a given life stage. His freedom from premature commitment to an academic discipline with rigid canons of concept formation released him for original formulations as well as new adaptations and implications of classical psychoanalysis. Erikson's shrewd "the Emperor has no clothes" type of realism and uninhibited daring in probing new areas of experience seem to draw on a never-suppressed child's penetrating curiosity.

His love of life in nature and in people of all ages and many different cultures underlies the predominantly warm and vital quality of his thinking and writing. This has evoked the resonance of students of many disciplines whom he has influenced more than any analyst since Freud.

Freud lived and worked at a time when the mentally ill were beginning to be understood and universal inner conflict needed to be understood more deeply. Erikson was maturing in a period when the fate of the Western world was threatened by violence and denigration of values—a time when health, "virtue," and strength and their origins needed to be asserted and understood. His later books anticipated the demands of youthful protesters who repudiated the falseness of politics and the materialism of the economic world and who called for sincerity, peace, love, and humane values.

Erikson died in 1994; however, his words live on— even those not familiar with his work may share his passion in language. Along with his numerous theories and plethora of information, Erikson also left educators the sound advice, "Do not mistake a child for his symptom."

Further Reading

Richard I. Evans published Dialogue with Erik Erikson (1967). A fine recent study is Robert Coles, Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work (1970). Henry W. Maier, Three Theories of Child Development: The Contributions of Erik H. Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Robert R. Sears, and Their Applications (1965; rev. ed. 1969), and Noël A. Kinsella, Toward a Theory of Personality Development: A Study of the Works of Erik H. Erikson (1966), contain biographical material as well as discussion of Erikson's theories. Jonas Langer, Theories of Development (1969), contains many references to Erikson. □

ERIKSON, ERIK 1902-1994

Developmental psychology

Stage Theory of Human Development and Identity

Erik Erikson, psychoanalyst with a Ph.D. in child psychology, is probably best known for his stage theory of human development. Erlkson's theory suggests that each stage of life, from infancy and early childhood on, is associated with a specific psychological struggle that significantly affects personality. Erikson, who coined the term identity crisis in naming that particular crisis inherent in adolescence, was an innovator whose influence shaped the emerging fields of child development and life-span studies. Defining identity as a basic confidence in one's inner continuity amid change, Erikson suggested that the emergence of this identity might be precipitated by a crisis and accompanied by intense neurotic suffering, especially for creative people. This theory had particular resonance during the 1960s, during which young people heard Erikson saying, "Your life is important; your relationship to your times is important; you can make a difference in society and you can find yourself in the process," according to Dr. Robert Wallerstein, now retired as head of the psychiatry department at the University of California, San Francisco.

Research and Writing in the 1960s

As a professor of human development at Harvard in the 1960s, Erikson conducted behavioral research, lectured at MIT, and published widely discussed texts, including Insight and Responsibility (1964) and Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968). During the decade Erikson frequently sojourned in India where he became fascinated with the life of Mohandas Gandhi. Inspired by Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience, Erikson wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of him. Erikson, hoping to advance innovative images of youth and young adulthood, was a pioneer in considering the role that cultural and societal factors play in shaping personality.

Influence on Education

Erikson's concepts of a malleable ego in adults and the importance of the social milieu in which a person negotiates each crisis influenced educational theory in the decade and beyond. His work proposed the idea that adults, despite poor childhoods, could compensate for their deprivations; that the mold of their first five years of life was not hard and fast. This theory lent credence to the importance of special programs for the culturally deprived. In a paper entitled "Ego Development and Historical Chance" he argues that racism and joblessness could affect the mind at the deepest layers of the unconsciousness, thus providing a frame-work for educational spending aimed at compensating for societal conditions. Although Erikson was neither a policy adviser nor an educational theorist, his studies of children and adolescents and his belief in the richness of human potential significantly affected education theory.

Sources:

Martin Finucane, "Erikson Opened Up Child Psychology," Columbia (S.C.) State, 17 May 1994, pp. Dl, D6;

Obituary, New York Times, 13 May 1994, p. C16;

Spencer A. Rathus, Pyschology (New York: Holt, Rinehart 8c Winston, 1987), pp. 401-402.