Erik Erikson

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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, 1902-94, 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).

1902-1994

Erik Homburger Erikson, American psychoanalyst, was born on June 15, 1902 in Frankfurt-am-Main, and died on May 12, 1994, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Erikson was the son of a Danish mother and unknown father. His step-father was a German pediatrician in Karlsruhe, and after Erikson left home his mother and step-father, both Jewish, moved to Palestine. In Vienna, Anna Freud became Erikson's analyst in 1927, and he graduated as a child analyst from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1933. Artistically inclined, Erikson said that he was first attracted to Freud's ideas by the magnificence of his German prose.

He entered Freud's circle in the summer of 1927, when he was working as a painter of children's portraits without any firm professional goals. An old school friend was at that time the director of a small progressive school in Vienna run by Dorothy Burlingham and Eva Rosenfeld, both close friends of Anna Freud.

Most of the children at the school were in psychoanalytic treatment, and a number of the parents were undergoing analysis. Erikson was hired to paint the portraits of the four Burlingham children. After a brief period as a tutor, Erikson was asked whether he would consider becoming a child analyst—a profession he had not heard of before.

By the end of 1933 Erikson had settled in Boston, Massachusetts. He worked in private practice as a child analyst, the first male in that field. He also was associated with the Harvard Psychological Clinic under Henry A. Murray, and did research at Yale. In 1939 Erikson became an American citizen, changing his name from his step-father's Homburger to the self-created Erikson. Later he moved to Berkeley, California where he became one of the founders of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society. After a 1951 loyalty oath controversy at the height of the McCarthy period, Erikson resigned from the University of California and moved to the Austin Riggs Center in western Massachusetts. In 1960 he accepted a prestigious university professorship at Harvard College.

Always uncomfortable in academic life, since he himself was without any formal training aside from being an analyst, Erikson retired from Harvard in the early 1970s to return to California where he worked at the Mt. Zion Department of Psychiatry in San Francisco. In 1987 he returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts. where an Erikson Center was established under Harvard's auspices. Erikson's final days were spent at a nursing home at Harwich on Cape Cod, near Cotuit where he and his wife Joan had long had a summer home.

Erikson's Childhood and Society first came out in 1950, and was reprinted more than any of his other books. Young Man Luther (1958) was a study in psychoanalysis and history, as Erikson treated Luther as an innovative psychologist whose Christian teachings complemented those of classical analysis. While Identity and the Life Cycle (1959) was a collection of his papers on ego psychology. Insight and Responsibility (1964) was a set of papers on the ethical implications of psychoanalytic insight. Gandhi's Truth (1969), a prize-winning book, sought the origins of militant non-violence in Gandhi's life. Erikson also gave the 1973 Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities, which appeared as Dimensions of a New Identity (1974). Life History and the Historical Moment (1975) was another collection of essays, and so was A Way of Looking at Things (1987).

Erikson used his concept of ego identity in order to move psychoanalytic theory away from Feud's libido approach; Erickson saw society as a constructive source of ego strength. Erikson also developed the notion of psychohistory as part of his effort to bring psychoanalysis into the modern social sciences.

Bibliography

Erikson, Erik H. (1950). Childhood and Society. New York: W. W. Norton.

——. (1958). Young Man Luther. NewYork: W. W. Norton.

——. (1959). Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: International Universities Press.

——. (1964). Insight and Responsibility. New York: W. W. Norton, 256 p.

——. (1969). Gandhi's Truth. New York: W. W. Norton.

—PAUL ROAZEN

(1902–1994)

Child psychoanalyst Erik Homburger Erikson focused his research on the effects of society and culture on individual psychological development; he also developed the eight-stage model of human development. Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany, of Danish parents who had separated before his birth. His surname for the first four decades of his life, Homburger, was that of his stepfather, a physician. Upon becoming a U.S. citizen in 1939 he adopted the surname Erikson.

Career

Although Erikson graduated from a classical gymnasium where he studied Latin, Greek, German literature, and history, he was not a good student. For the next seven years following his graduation, he was a wandering artist through Europe, sketching, doing woodcuts and etchings, and intermittently studying art. In 1927, at age 25, he received an invitation from a childhood friend in Vienna to teach in a small progressive school for English and American children. While teaching art and history, he became acquainted with the Freud family and was judged an excellent candidate for psychoanalytic training. As Robert Coles observed, at that time candidates did not apply, but were chosen.

He graduated with a diploma from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1933, where he was viewed as a gifted student. He also was one of two men to graduate from the Montessori teachers association. Upon graduation, he and his wife and young son fled from the encroaching Nazi domination to the United States.

Although Erikson had no formal degree, he became the first child analyst in Boston and a research associate at Harvard Medical School. From 1936 through the 1940s, he served as a research associate at Yale, then at the University of California, finally receiving a professional appointment at the latter institution. During this period, in addition to his analytic work with children, he undertook the in-depth observational study of children in two American Indian tribes, the Sioux of South Dakota and the Yuron of northern California. These studies marked the beginning of his integration of the analytic clinical perspective with the social and economic events that influence child development.

Shortly after Erikson received a professorial appointment at the University of California, the signing of a loyalty oath became a contractual requirement for faculty. Refusing to sign the oath, Erikson resigned in June 1950. Noting that his field, psychoanalysis, included the study of hysteria, he stated he could not participate in this inadequate response to public hysteria. Erikson then returned to the analysis of troubled children by accepting a position at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1960 he was appointed professor at Harvard University, where he remained until his retirement in the early 1970s.

Contribution

Although trained as a psychoanalyst, Erikson's scholarship, which included fourteen books, transcended the discipline in his interweaving of culture, history, and the individual across a variety of topics. Specifically, he applied psychoanalysis in addressing anthropological, religious, and historical questions in addition to developing a comprehensive life span model of psychological development.

In his work, Erikson went beyond the Freudian focus on dysfunctional behavior to pursue the ways that the normal self is able to function successfully. His unique contribution to the applications of psychoanalysis, his inclusion of the effects of society and culture on individual psychological development, led to the designation of his perspective as psychosocial. Early examples are the study of the American Indian children, which combined anthropological observation and clinical analysis with tribal history and economic circumstances.

Erikson also applied psychoanalysis to develop richly detailed biographical histories of leaders who made a difference in society. Included are his chapter on Maxim Gorky, his lectures on Thomas Jefferson, and his books on Martin Luther (Young Man Luther:A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, 1962) and Mahatma Gandhi. The latter work, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969), received both the 1970 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In these works, Erikson applied clinical analysis to develop an understanding of the ways that leaders faced with untenable situations rose above them to forge new identities for themselves and other citizens.

In education and psychology, Erikson is best known for his eight-stage model of the human life cycle, developed with the assistance of his wife, Joan. This model identifies particular goals, challenges, and concerns at each stage of life. They are the following: (1) Basic Trust versus Basic Mistrust (infancy); (2) Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt (early childhood); (3) Initiative versus Guilt (play age); (4) Industry versus Inferiority (school age); (5) Identity versus Role Confusion (adolescence); (6) Intimacy versus Isolation (young adulthood); (7) Generativity versus Stagnation (adulthood); (8) Ego Identity versus Despair (later adulthood). Further, the stages are interdependent in that unresolved conflicts at one stage influence development at later stages, as in the development of either a loving trusting relationship with a caregiver in infancy or mistrust of others.

Unlike Freud, who focused on early childhood, Erikson emphasized adolescence and adulthood. Erikson introduced the term identity and identity crisis to explain the psychological and social complexities faced by young people in attempting to find their place in a specific town, nation, and time. Adolescent development, in other words, is a complex answer to the question, "Who am I?" and requires organization of the individual's drives, abilities, beliefs, and history into a view of oneself. This focus reflects Erikson's own youthful wanderings before finding his place as a teacher, analyst, and writer.

In the 1960s Erikson focused on the seventh or "generative" stage of adulthood. In this stage, adults are obligated to care for the next generation, either one's own children or a broader group, through personal deeds and words. In the case of Gandhi, his contribution to the next generation was his militant nonviolence as a means to address social injustice. In addition Erikson described the final stage, late adulthood, as an active period that involves acceptance of self and the development of wisdom.

A third focus in Erikson's writing, ethical and moral responsibility, is reflected most prominently in Insight and Responsibility (1964). In this work, he included a set of eight virtues that correspond with his eight life stages (hope, will, purpose, competence, fidelity, love, care, and wisdom). He also introduced the term pseudospeciation to describe the destructive mechanism that leads to human conflict, aggression, and war. Specifically, pseudospeciation refers to the "arrogant placing of one's nation, race, culture, and (or) society ahead of others; the failure to recognize that all of humanity was of one species" (Friedman, p. 357). Groups of individuals, in other words, are assigned membership in a not-quite human or pseudo-species. With this concept, as in his other writings, Erikson spoke to human psychological issues within the broader context of history and culture.

Bibliography

Coles, Robert. 1970. Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work. Boston: Little, Brown.

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

Erikson, Erik H. 1950. Children and Society. New York: Norton.

Erikson, Erik H. 1962. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Norton.

Erikson, Erik H. 1964. Insight and Responsibility. New York: Norton.

Erikson, Erik H. 1969. Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence. New York: Norton.

Erikson, Erik H. 1981 "The Galilean Sayings and the Sense of 'I."' Yale Review 70:321 - 362.

Friedman, Lawrence J. 1998. "Erik H. Erikson's Critical Themes and Voices: The Task of Synthesis." In Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson, ed. Robert S. Wallerstein and Leo Goldberger. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.

Kotre, John. 1984. Outliving the Self: Generativity and the Interpretation of Lives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

— MARGARET GREDLER

(1902-1994)

1969	Gandhi's Truth: On the Origin of Militant Nonviolence. The German-born psychoanalyst wins both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his study of Gandhi, noteworthy for its application of psychoanalytic theory to an understanding of Gandhi's ideas and development.

Quotes:

"Farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters -- where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives, as moral as they must be, as free as they may be, and as masterly as they can be. If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness."

"Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired."

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