Erikson, Erik Homburger

(b. 15 June 1902 in Frankfurt, Germany; d. 12 May 1994 in Harwich, Massachusetts), psychoanalyst who theorized that psychological development is best understood in the context of social, geographical, and historical circumstances and is best known for his study of the adolescent “identity crisis” and as a founder of the discipline of psychohistory.

Erikson was the son of Karla Abrahamsen, a member of a prominent Jewish family in Copenhagen, Denmark. Karla’s first husband had abandoned her four years before she became pregnant and she was sent to live with relatives in Germany for the birth of her first child. In Germany, Abrahamsen met the pediatrician Theodore Homburger, and the couple was married in 1905. Erik was told that Homburger was his biological father and carried his name beginning in 1905. Until 1911, when Erik was legally adopted by Homburger, his birth certificate listed his father as Valdemar Salomonsen, Karla’s first husband, but the true identity of Erikson’s biological father is unknown. He and his two half sisters were raised in the upper-middle-class Jewish neighborhood of Karlsruhe. (Another child died at age two.) Erikson attended the local gymnasium, where, according to Erikson’s own account, his tall, blond, blue-eyed physical appearance often marked him as different from other Jewish children, just as his name and family marked him as different from the dominant German Gentile culture. Later in life, Erikson often noted that his early years as an immigrant and as an adopted child placed him on the margins of multiple cultural identities and prompted his lifelong concern with the nature of identity formation in individuals and groups.

Beginning in 1922, the young Erikson undertook a Wandhershaft, an extended period of wandering, reading, reflection, and journal writing typical of many middle-class European youths of his day. As he traveled around Europe, he occasionally found employment as a portrait sketch artist. In 1927 he accepted a life-changing invitation from his friend Peter Bios to work with children at the Hietzing School in Vienna, Austria, established primarily for children of the psychoanalytic patients of Sigmund Freud and associates. Erikson’s exceptional skills with children quickly caught the attention of Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, who invited the young man to enter analysis. Anna Freud’s goal was to train Erikson as one of the first child analysts in the Vienna psychoanalytic circle. At her urging, Erikson also completed Montessori training in 1932, the only official diploma he ever earned. During this period of his life, he met and married Canadian-born Joan Serson, a student of dance and crafts, on 27 September 1930. The couple settled into domestic life in Vienna while Erikson completed his psychoanalytic training with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Their first son was born in 1930. In 1933, after a second son was born, Erik was admitted as a full member of the society, which gave him the credentials to practice psychoanalysis internationally. By 1933 the Eriksons had become wary of Adolf Hitler’s power and influence over Austria. Anti-Semitism was on the rise in the region, and the family left that year for Denmark and later for the United States.

Soon after arriving in America, Erikson opened a private practice in psychoanalysis in Boston, which provided a simple but adequate income for the young family’s basic needs. In 1938 Joan gave birth to a daughter. Erikson’s psychoanalytic practice began to grow, and he soon found himself called upon to consult with members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and the prestigious Judge Baker Clinic. He also obtained research fellowships at the Harvard Psychological Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital’s department of psychiatry. In 1939, with the encouragement of his older children and wife, Erikson applied for U.S. citizenship, and the family name was officially changed from Homburger to Erikson.

During his long career, Erikson taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of California at Los Angeles and served in a variety of research and clinical settings. He also had an extended clinical appointment at the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for the treatment of psychoanalytic patients. Erikson became well known among psychoanalytic practitioners in the nation as a gifted analyst with children, and they often referred their most difficult cases to him. In 1935 he began an association with Yale University, where he pioneered studies in the use of toys in the psychoanalysis of children. During this time Erikson also engaged in a number of anthropological studies with Native Americans in the American West. While at UCLA in 1951, in protest of the extremes of McCarthy era politics, Erikson refused to sign the loyalty oath required of faculty members employed by California universities and resigned his position.

In 1944, Joan Erikson gave birth to a fourth child, who was born with Down’s syndrome. The child was immediately institutionalized and his existence kept secret. It was a traumatic experience for Erikson, and the boy’s birth and absence from the home seemed to establish a backdrop and shadowy context for his work on “normal” childhood development. In 1950 Erikson published a collection of essays, Childhood and Society, which included case studies, historical reflection, theoretical constructions, and anthropological studies. Perhaps the most penetrating essay was a study of Hitler’s psychological development as a child and adolescent, in which Erikson anticipated much current thought on “gang” behavior among adolescents and adults. After the publication of Childhood and Society, Erikson gradually began to shift his emphasis from clinical work to writing, speaking, and teaching. He always gave credit to his wife as coauthor of his work. By 1970 Erikson was a well-known figure in American cultural life. In that year, his picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and his work and career were featured in numerous national publications. Erikson’s study of the sixteenth-century church reformer Martin Luther Young Man Luther, 1958) and of Mohandas Gandhi (Gandhi’s Truth, 1969) were popular among social critics of the time, and the work on Gandhi won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1973 he was selected from more than 200 nominees to present the Jefferson Lectures sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Erikson’s primary contribution to American intellectual and cultural history came through his writings. When Childhood and Society was published in 1950 it received respectable but limited attention. The work was rediscovered, however, during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and again during the Vietnam War. Erikson’s mapping of the human life cycle and particular emphasis on the identity crisis struck a chord with those who saw America suffering from its own version of a collective identity crisis. New notice was also given to Erikson’s work on Martin Luther, wherein Erikson combined psychoanalysis and history in a particularly vivid fashion, sparking an ongoing interest in the use of psychology within the disciplines of historical and cultural studies. His work on Gandhi, completed shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., provided an alternative perspective on violence, political oppression, and the psychology of human freedom.

In 1975 the critic Marshall Berman published an article in the New York Times Book Review that accused Erikson of denying his Jewish heritage by changing his name and by de-emphasizing the significance of ethnic identity. While most who knew the complexity of Erikson’s personality thought the accusation was overly harsh, it did raise questions that troubled the aging Erikson deeply. He chose not to respond, aside from reminding his public that he had retained his stepfather’s name as his middle name throughout his life. It is also worth noting that Erikson’s final major literary effort was a largely unknown psycho-historical essay on Jesus of Nazareth, “The Galilean Sayings and the Sense of ‘I’” (Yale Review, 1982). In this complex essay, Erikson drew together the breadth of his psychoanalytic and historical interests, with particular emphasis on the contribution of Jewish culture in the development of a moral alternative to the mechanized violence of the modern world. Speaking from the “margins of psychology and theology,” Erikson framed a vision, informed by the disciplines of history and psychoanalysis, of a universal “table fellowship” in which human beings might find peace and mutual affirmation. In the end, however, Erikson did not commit himself in this essay or anywhere else to a particular religious or ideological position. Erikson was a sought-after speaker until frailty and illness began to lessen his vigor. He died peacefully at age ninety-two in a nursing home. He is buried in the Cemetery of the First Congregational Church in Harwich.

Erikson’s work on human psychological and social development is imbedded in the very language by which Americans and others discuss and analyze individual and collective identity formation. The subject of “identity crisis” has worked its way into countless research and therapeutic projects. His work on the stages of the human life cycle has shaped the conversation in our culture about life passages from infancy to old age. He pioneered “psychohistory” in his works on Luther, Hitler, Thomas Jefferson, Gandhi, and others. While psychohistory as a specific discipline has never flourished, it is commonplace now for historians to use some measure of psychological analysis in their writing, particularly in biographical work.

Erikson’s primary contribution to American intellectual culture was his insistence that individual psychological development should always be studied and understood in the context of human social, geographical and historical realities. He was also a subtle but radical reformer of psychoanalytic thought and practice. Although he never launched a public critique of his Freudian heritage, he quietly set about upending the Freudian emphasis on pathology. By contrast, Erikson recast psychoanalysis with a particularly upbeat American flavor that emphasized the adaptability of ego development.

Harvard University’s Houghton Library holds many of Erikson’s more important manuscripts and papers. The most accurate and authoritative biography of Erikson is Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik, H. Erikson (1999), which is also the best overview of Erikson’s writings. The Harvard psychiatrist and teacher Robert Coles wrote an extended commentary, Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work (1970), but it is limited by its lack of critical perspective. Noteworthy critical examinations of Erikson are Paul Roazen, The Power and Limits of a Vision (1976), which takes Erikson to task for lack of experimental rigor; Frederick Crews, Skeptical Engagements (1986), which charges that Erikson was a particularly subtle and dangerous representative of Freudian orthodoxy; Hetty Zock, Psychology of Ultimate Concern: Erik H. Erikson’s Contribution to the Psychology of Religion (1990), a more positive examination of the existentialist force of Erikson’s work and a summary of Erikson’s work without resorting to excessive reductionism; and Stephen Schlein, A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980. Erik H. Eriksson (1987), a collection of important essays. An obituary is in the Washington Post (14 May 1994).

David C. Andersen