ERIKSON, ERIK HOMBURGER

(b. Frankfurt, Germany, 15 June 1902;

d. Harwich, Massachusetts, 12 May 1994), psychoanalytic theory, psychohistory and psychobiography, child and adolescent psychotherapy, developmental psychology.

Erikson is best known for identifying eight stages of psychosocial development in the human life cycle and for his concept of the identity crisis. He expanded psychoanalytic theory to include the influence of cultural variations on individual ego development, and showed how personality development in certain key individuals can induce widespread cultural changes. For his book Gandhi’s Truth, he won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. By improving Sigmund Freud’s case-history research methods and extending their application beyond childhood to the entire life span, Erikson became the father of contemporary psychobiographical research.

Early Development . Erik Erikson entered the world in the midst of an identity crisis. Conceived in Denmark, he was born in Germany. His mother, Karla Abrahamsen, was a Danish Jew; his father was probably a Danish Gentile, perhaps an artist or photographer. She had been very briefly married to another man several years earlier, but never revealed the identity of Erik’s father. To avoid scandalizing her family, she moved from Copenhagen to Frankfurt before the birth. Baby Erik was blond and blue-eyed, resembling no one in the family. He became well aware of his differences from those around him as he grew older. On his third birthday his mother married a German Jewish pediatrician; she told Erik that the doctor was his birth father. Little Erik had his suspicions, entertaining the sort of fantasy that Freud called the “family romance”: that both his true parents must be much finer than these obvious imposters. Erik was not officially told about his adoptive status until late childhood; he remained bitter about how his mother and stepfather had lied to him, as a brief autobiography written nearly sixty years later indicates:

I grew up in Karlsruhe in Baden as the son of a pediatrician, Dr. Theodor Homburger, and his wife Karla, née Abrahamsen, a native of Copenhagen, Denmark. All through my earlier childhood they kept secret from me the fact that my mother had been married previously and that I was the son of a Dane who had abandoned her before my birth. (1970, p. 742)

Except for such questions about his true identity, Erik Homburger had a comfortable childhood, with a solid classical education at the local Gymnasium. He displayed artistic talent and was encouraged in that direction by his mother’s artist friends. His stepfather wanted Erik to follow in his footsteps as a pediatrician; Erik chose instead to pursue the wandering life of an art student from his late teens until age twenty-five. It was not unusual at that time for the sons of well-to-do German families to pursue a Wanderjahr(literally, wandering year) or a longer Wander-schaft(period of journeying). (He later wrote about such socially approved postponements of full adulthood, referring to them as “psychosocial moratoria.”) Erik’s mother provided occasional financial support, and he was able to sell or barter sketches to people he met on his travels. Eventually he realized that he was not sufficiently talented to become a full-time artist, so he returned to Karlsruhe to become an art teacher. At that point a friend of his from the Gymnasium, Peter Blos, told him of a more interesting possibility. In Vienna, Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna had become close to a wealthy American heiress, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, who needed a tutor for her four children. Erik was first hired to sketch the children, then took over their tutoring from Blos. Erik impressed the children and both women with his competence and empathy. Other members of the Freud circle, including analysts and patients, also had children who needed to be educated. Blos was invited to set up a small psychoanalytically oriented school, with himself and Erik as the faculty.

Psychoanalytic Training . In 1927, when Erik Homburger joined Blos in Vienna, he knew little or nothing about psychoanalysis. But it was an exciting time to get to know the Freuds and the ideas they were advancing. Sigmund Freud had recently proposed a new theory of anxiety, emphasizing its use by the ego to keep other parts of the personality in line. Anna Freud was beginning to develop her own ideas, building on her father’s concepts about unconscious defenses to understand how adolescents cope with inner and outer threats to their continuing psychological development. She was also analyzing children directly, rather than waiting for them to enter analysis as adults with problems left over from childhood. Other members of the Freudian circle were similarly reshaping Sigmund Freud’s earlier concepts into a more reality-oriented “ego psychology,” in contrast to the earlier “id psychology” that emphasized unconscious urges for immediate satisfaction. Sigmund Freud, who gave Anna a training analysis though she had no advanced degrees in medicine or otherwise, had begun to encourage the practice of “lay analysis” by other nonmedical psychoanalysts in Europe and America.

Anna Freud was eager to expand the practice of child analysis, whether by psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists or by analysts with talents in other directions. Recognizing Erik Homburger’s promise in the way he taught young children, she offered him a nearly free training analysis. He hesitantly accepted her offer, at first having no intention to practice as a psychoanalyst. During his four years of almost daily analysis with Anna, he often encountered Sigmund in the waiting room between their offices, but all his substantive conversations were with Anna alone. Erik was shy, and he knew that Sigmund was already suffering badly from the oral cancer that would eventually kill him, so they rarely said anything more to each other than hello. Erik learned his psychoanalytic theory and practice directly from Anna Freud, from reading Sigmund Freud’s works, and from seminars with prominent analysts at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. As Erik’s ideas about psychoanalytic theory and practice began to emerge, he offered them in a soft-spoken and thoughtful manner, avoiding the loud rebelliousness of some of Freud’s former disciples. In Lawrence Friedman’s accurate characterization, Erik engaged in a “process of embracing while amplifying and subtly criticizing” Freudian theory (1999, p. 88), not only as a student in Vienna but throughout his psychoanalytic career.

Professional Beginnings . At a Viennese masked ball in 1929, Erik Homburger met a Canadian-American teacher and student of modern dance named Joan Serson. They fell in love, moved in together, and married shortly after they found she was pregnant. Joan was Episcopalian, doubted the value of psychoanalysis, and disliked Anna Freud. But she was a believer in Erik’s capabilities, brought increased order to his life, and gradually helped him to develop an eloquence in his English-language writings that he might not have otherwise achieved. After he finished his clinical training and became a full member both of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association, they decided together that it was time to leave Vienna. Erik wanted to establish his own psychoanalytic practice, somewhere beyond the tight circle around Sigmund and Anna Freud. The Nazis were gaining strength in Austria as well as in Germany, and Joan was dismayed by the thought of raising children in such an ugly political atmosphere. They left Vienna in spring 1933, going first to Copenhagen, where Erik still had a number of maternal relatives and where he hoped to find traces of his birth father. But psychoanalysis was in official disfavor there, and the Danish government refused to give Erik a work permit. Rather

than returning to Vienna, the Homburgers headed for America.

Erik had been encouraged by Hanns Sachs, an early Freud disciple who had moved to Boston, to set up a child analysis practice there. Joan’s mother also lived there and promised to help them. They arrived in fall 1933 with two small sons in tow. In spite of his limited facility in English, Erik quickly gained a strong reputation as a child analyst, achieving impressive success in treating several adults as well. Despite his lack of higher-educational degrees (or indeed any degrees beyond his graduation from the Gymnasium in Karlsruhe and a diploma in Montessori education), he was offered part-time professional positions in several Boston-area clinical settings. Most significantly in terms of his subsequent career, he was hired by Henry A. Murray to join the staff of the Harvard Psychological Clinic.

The clinic did not operate primarily as a treatment facility but as a research center, empirically testing psychoanalytic concepts and other approaches to personality. Murray quickly made Erik a member of the center’s Diagnostic Council, an elite group of experts in one or another approach to personality assessment. Murray asked him to apply a modified version of a technique that Erik had already used successfully with children, in which the child patient creates a doll family out of clay and then acts out various family interactions among the dolls, to the center’s Harvard undergraduate volunteer subjects. When the results of the center’s first major study were published in 1938 as the now-classic volume Explorations in Personality, Erik was listed on the title page as one of Murray’s coauthors, still under the name of Erik Homburger.

By that time, however, Erik and his family (now including a daughter) had moved on. His reputation as a child analyst was spreading rapidly, attracting particular attention at a campus that was active both in research on children and in the incorporation of psychoanalytic theory into academic psychology: Yale University. Erikson was offered a position there—again, not as a full-time faculty member in one department, but as a part-timer with his time split among several programs. Henry Murray was unhappy to see him go, but Erik was beginning to express ambitions that the largely experiment-oriented Harvard psychology department was unlikely to let him fulfill. The move to Yale also enabled Erik to start over again personally, by changing his last name from his stepfather’s “Homburger” to the self-created “Erikson.” He kept Homburger as his middle name, to honor his stepfather’s contributions to his upbringing; he thought of Erikson as recognizing his birth father—who, according to some Copenhagen rumors, shared the given name of Erik. Both Erik and Joan adopted the Erikson name when they became naturalized U.S. citizens in 1938, and also gave the name to their three children, who were happy that other children would not be calling them “Hamburger” any more. That was one of the reasons Erik Erikson later gave for the change in the family name.

Though Erikson was welcomed by some child psychologists at Yale, others disdained his empathic approach to understanding children. He lasted no longer there than at Harvard. By now, however, his reputation had spread as far as the West Coast, where in 1939 he was offered another package of part-time positions at the University of California’s (UC) Berkeley campus. Those part-time positions included the chance to work with samples of psychologically healthy children, rather than the disturbed ones he had mostly been observing and treating. Complementing an earlier research trip to an Oglala Sioux reservation, he also visited a Yurok tribe in Northern California, where he questioned and observed adults and children concerning tribal child-raising practices. Such cross-cultural excursions added to his own contrasting observations of childhood in Germany, Austria, and America. During World War II, he employed his cross-cultural expertise to provide U.S. government agencies with analyses of German national character, including the development of Adolf Hitler’s charismatic appeal to German youth.

Erikson’s initial appointments at UC Berkeley were not renewed, partly as a result of personal and theoretical clashes with sponsoring faculty members. During most of the 1940s he supported himself largely through private clinical practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. He also wrote a series of important papers, which he began to see as the foundation for his first book. His growing professional reputation and the impending publication of this book, as well as a competing offer from Yale, led UC Berkeley to offer him a tenured full professorship in 1949. That was a remarkable achievement for a man who had never earned a formal degree and who had begun to learn English only at age thirty-one. Erikson was delighted to receive such recognition from the academic establishment, and soon accepted the offer. But after a year in this prestigious new position, he joined a faculty protest against a loyalty oath imposed by the UC’s Board of Regents, resigning his professorship along with several other members of the psychology department. For several months he maintained a temporary research appointment at Berkeley, but the Northeast was calling again.

Midlife Achievement and Influence . In October 1950, three months after submitting his statement of resignation to UC, Erikson published his first and most influential book, Childhood and Society. The book was not a systematic explication of his ideas but included examples from each of the several related lines of his psychoanalytic research and writing. Four underlying themes were evident throughout: the constant work of the individual ego in mediating between the demands of biology and society; the influence of an individual’s distinctive social world on his or her psychological development; the developmental challenges faced by the individual from early childhood throughout adulthood and into old age; and the promotion of healthy psychological development rather than a focus on the neurotic struggles of the usual clinical case history. Each of these themes represented modifications and expansions in the perspectives of Sigmund Freud and his immediate followers, and were therefore controversial among orthodox psychoanalysts. But Erikson’s discussion of psychological development across the whole human life span attracted the enthusiastic attention of many readers outside Freudian circles.

Like Freud, Erikson conceptualized personality development as proceeding through a series of distinct stages, with the possibility of becoming fixated at a given stage when the individual is unable to cope effectively with that stage’s distinctive developmental crisis. But whereas Freud focused on what he called “psychosexual” stages and crises, Erikson concluded that those early developmental stages were much broader in scope, involving “psychosocial” crises as well. In Freud’s oral stage, the developmental crisis is weaning; Erikson saw the broader crisis the child faces there as whether to develop a basic sense of trust in the parents or to retain a sense of mistrust. In

Freud’s anal stage, the crisis is toilet training; Erikson identified the broader crisis as developing a sense of autonomy or becoming overwhelmed by shame and self-doubt. In Freud’s phallic stage, the crisis involves the child’s assertion of sexual or sensual attraction to the opposite-sexed parent and a perception of threat from the same-sexed parent; Erikson saw the issue more broadly (and not just sexually) as a matter of displaying initiative or of developing “a sense of guilt over the goals contemplated and the acts initiated in one’s exuberant enjoyment of new locomotor and mental power” (1963, p. 255). In Freud’s latency stage, the child represses Oedipal concerns while undergoing asexual cognitive development; Erikson likewise sees the stage as one where the child “develops a sense of industry. … In all cultures, at this stage, children receive some systematic instruction” (1963, p. 259), which may instead yield a sense of inferiority. In Freud’s genital stage, the crisis is one of attaining full adult sexual capabilities; Erikson sees it as just as significantly concerned with attaining a sense of one’s individual identity, in terms not only of gender but of occupational interests and other personal enthusiasms and social roles. Erikson also identified several additional developmental stages beyond the achievement of genital maturity and ego identity. In these further stages, Freud’s psychosexual emphasis recedes as the psychosocial issues of full adulthood come to the fore.

The stages of psychosocial development that Erikson diagramed and discussed in Childhood and Society’s central chapter, “Eight Ages of Man,” have become a standard feature of introductory psychology textbooks and self-help best sellers (with the latter often disguising their Eriksonian sources behind new terminology). His book was not an immediate best seller, but within less than a decade after its publication the Eriksonian psychosocial stages were recognized by many developmental psychologists and other mental health professionals as a good way to organize thinking about major turning points across the individual’s life cycle. Though Erikson’s resignation from his tenured full professorship at Berkeley was a courageous form of protest against an abridgment of academic freedom, the publication of Childhood and Society meant that he had little need to worry about getting another job fairly quickly.

Indeed, his next job offered advantages that Berkeley did not. He joined the clinical staff of the Austen Riggs Center, a private psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The center’s staff included several other distinguished psychoanalysts, who were happy to have Erikson as a colleague. He was given a light patient load, mostly troubled adolescents who provided case material for his study of identity issues, and he was allowed substantial time to write. He became a prolific writer during his Austen Riggs years, most significantly producing his first full-length psychobiography, Young Man Luther(1958). In his earlier and much briefer study of Hitler’s childhood, he traced the role of certain Germanic cultural influences as they interacted with Adolf’s particular family circumstances to produce a massively destructive personality pattern. In Young Man Luther, Erikson examined other Germanic cultural patterns in interaction with Luther’s childhood circumstances as they led to a similarly society-changing but more constructive outcome. He used Luther’s example to discuss in much greater detail than before the fifth stage of his eight-stage psychosocial schema, Ego Identity versus Role Confusion, as it culminates in an identity crisis. Martin Luther resolved his identity crisis, according to Erikson, by advancing a new concept of man’s relationship to God, thus initiating the Protestant Reformation.

Erikson also used his discussion of Luther to offer advice to other biographers on how to do psychobiography responsibly: look for the sources of the subject’s psychological strengths, not only for serious flaws; avoid “originology,” which Erikson defined as focusing only on childhood sources of adult personality without recognizing the contributions of later developmental stages; pay attention to obvious gaps in the biographical record (such as, in this case, any significant mention of Luther’s mother) and look for evidence that might productively bridge those gaps. Although some Luther scholars have criticized Erikson’s analysis of Luther, others have praised his book as insightful and as stimulating further scholarship. (See the volume edited by Capps, Capps, and Bradford, 1977, for several perspectives.) His methodological suggestions have also been seen as advancing psychobiography significantly beyond Freud’s initial contributions to the field.

After spending most of the 1950s at the Austen Riggs Center, Erikson was offered a position at Harvard University that was tailor-made for him: a full-time appointment as professor of human development—a title that he chose, with no obligations to any specific academic department, but with freedom to teach on the topics of his expertise and to associate with friendly and influential colleagues in several areas. He was also named as a lecturer in the Harvard Medical School’s department of psychiatry, though he had no medical degree. By this time, as Erikson remarked in his “Autobiographic Notes on the Identity Crisis,” he had come as close as possible to being a pediatrician (his stepfather’s original aim for him) without going to medical school.

At Harvard, Erikson taught a course on the human life cycle to undergraduates for the first time. The course was quite popular; over the years he was assigned a variety of graduate teaching assistants to help him with the large enrollments. Several of these assistants later went on to prominence in the social and behavioral sciences themselves, including Robert Coles, Kenneth Keniston, Carol Gilligan, and Mary Catherine Bateson. Perhaps in part because he gained so much satisfaction by nurturing both undergraduate students and graduate assistants in this course, Erikson focused in his next book on the seventh stage of his life cycle schema, generativity versus stagnation. (It should be noted that Stage Seven issues had earlier become painfully salient to Erikson himself after Joan gave birth to a Down syndrome child in 1944. At Erikson’s direction, the child was quickly placed in a private institution and died there in 1965 without parental contact or acknowledgment.)

Like his earlier work on Luther, Gandhi’s Truth(1969) is a psychobiography of a revolutionary figure who resolves a developmental crisis in his own life while initiating a major religious and political movement that changes the culture around him. Though Mohandas Gandhi had identity issues as a young man, Erikson saw his crucial psychosocial crisis as that of middle age: accepting or rejecting one’s responsibilities to other people. Erik-son’s carefully chosen word for the positive pole of Stage Seven’s crisis, “generativity,” most often refers to taking care of one’s own children, but it can also encompass taking care of others’ children (as in a classroom), taking care of one’s community (as expressed in political responsibilities), and in Gandhi’s case, taking care of a whole nation—initiating and guiding the cultural and political changes that ultimately freed India from British rule. Erikson gave special attention to Gandhi’s development of satyagraha, usually translated as “truth force” or (more passively) “nonviolent resistance,” which involves caring for one’s opponents as well as for one’s fellow citizens. Erikson did not judge Gandhi’s motives as altogether virtuous, however; a major point of his book was the need not only for “Gandhi’s Truth” in the form of satyagraha, but for “Freud’s Truth” in the form of self-exploration and self-criticism of one’s less conscious motives. (In Gandhi’s case, according to Erikson, these included unstated urges toward violence in addition to his endorsement of peaceful goal-seeking). Erikson also continued to elaborate his methodological advice to other psychobiographers, especially in terms of what to make of a subject’s autobiographical accounts. As he pointed out, Gandhi wrote several versions of his autobiography at different times in his life; the astute psychobiographer needs to pay attention to Gandhi’s intended audience and underlying aims when interpreting and assessing each autobiographical version.

Moving into Old Age . Erikson retired from the Harvard teaching faculty in 1970, but he hardly retired from writing. Although he did not complete any more long psychobiographies along the lines of the Luther and Gandhi books, he wrote thoughtful shorter works on Thomas Jefferson and on Jesus. With the full participation of his wife Joan, he continued to write about the later stages of the life cycle. Perhaps his most interesting treatment of the final stage, dealing with the crisis he called “ego integrity versus despair,” was a paper he had originally developed for his Harvard undergraduate course as a commentary on the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries. The film depicts an elderly Scandinavian professor’s review of his entire life cycle on the day he is to receive an honorary degree for his life’s work—no doubt a personally resonant film for Erikson, but also an excellent medium for him to communicate to young people what it means to look back on one’s life at its end and to assess whether it has been emotionally and morally rewarding or deeply disappointing.

In his late seventies Erikson thought about writing a full-scale autobiography, perhaps as a further illustration of that final stage of psychosocial development. But he did not do it; as he moved into his eighties, his memories and his eloquence began to fade. Continuing the pattern he had followed throughout his life, he moved every few years from one part of the country to another, though by now the places he moved to were mostly returns: back for a while to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, then to Tiburon in the San Francisco Bay Area, then across the continent again to Cape Cod and to Cambridge, near Harvard. During his final years he was unable to write anything or to remember much of what had gone before. He died on Cape Cod at age ninety-one. His wife Joan continued to write about the life cycle until her own death three years later.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The primary archival collection of Erikson’s papers is in the Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University.

WORKS BY ERIKSON

“Dramatic Productions Test.” In Explorations in Personality, by Henry A. Murray et al., pp. 552–582. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938.

Childhood and Society. New York: Norton, 1950. 2nd, enlarged ed., 1963.

“The Dream Specimen of Psychoanalysis.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association2 (1954): 5–56.

Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Norton, 1958.

Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton, 1968.

Gandhi’s Truth: The Origins of Militant Nonviolence. New York: Norton, 1969.

“Autobiographic Notes on the Identity Crisis.” Daedalus99, no. 4 (1970): 730–759.

Dimensions of a New Identity. New York: Norton, 1974.

Life History and the Historical Moment. New York: Norton, 1975.

“Reflections on Dr. Borg’s Life Cycle.” Daedalus105, no. 2 (1976): 1–31.

“The Galilean Sayings and the Sense of ‘I’.” Yale Review70, no. 3 (1981): 321–362.

The Life Cycle Completed. New York: Norton, 1982.

A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980. Edited by Stephen Schlein. New York: Norton, 1987. Includes a complete bibliography of Erikson’s published work.

The Erik Erikson Reader. Edited by Robert Coles. New York: Norton, 2000.

OTHER SOURCES

Alexander, Irving L. “Erikson and Psychobiography, Psychobiography and Erikson.” In Handbook of Psychobiography, edited by William Todd Schultz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Bloland, Sue Erikson. In the Shadow of Fame. New York: Viking, 2005. A memoir of family life by Erikson’s daughter, who is a psychotherapist.

Capps, Donald, Walter H. Capps, and M. Gerald Bradford, eds. Encounter with Erikson: Historical Interpretation and Religious Biography. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977.

Coles, Robert. Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. A sympathetic biography by one of Erikson’s most distinguished students.

Evans, Richard I. Dialogue with Erik Erikson. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Transcripts of several filmed interviews with Erikson.

Friedman, Lawrence J. Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. New York: Scribner, 1999. The most extensive and detailed biography.

Roazen, Paul. Erik H. Erikson: The Power and Limits of a Vision. New York: Free Press, 1976. A critical biography; Erikson privately disputed some details.

Stevens, Richard. Erik Erikson: An Introduction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. A brief and clear presentation of Erikson’s life and work.

Alan C. Elms