Erik Erikson

Erikson was born in Frankfurt on 15 June 1902. His mother, Karla Abrahamsen, was a Danish Jew whose husband had abandoned the family before Erik was born. When she remarried, the boy took the surname Homburger, and he took the name Erik Homburger Erikson when he applied for American citizenship (Harvard memorial minute¹). After the classical gymnasium in Karlsruhe he studied art, spending a year at the Baden State School of Art and two years at the Academy of Art in Munich, and then some years travelling. Lawrence J. Friedman's biography, Identity's Architect⁴, follows his life from this uncertain parentage onward and reads his later theory of identity in the light of his own history.

Erikson arrived in Vienna in 1927. Anna Freud invited him to teach at a small private school whose pupils were mostly children of the Freudian circle. Soon afterwards he entered analysis with her, which lasted until about 1933, and began training as a child analyst (Identity's Architect⁴). He attended occasional university courses, mostly in art and art history, and began medical studies. He gave these up when he became a full member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1933. In 1930 he had married Joan Serson (Harvard memorial minute¹).

In 1933 Erikson, his wife and their two young children emigrated to the United States and settled in Boston. He built up an analytic practice and held posts at the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Judge Baker Clinic and the Harvard Psychological Clinic. He also enrolled as a graduate student in psychology at Harvard but left without a degree in 1936, because the department's methods did not suit his own. From 1936 to 1939 he was at Yale's Institute of Human Relations, as a research associate and instructor in psychiatry and pediatrics. During these years he visited the Oglala Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. According to the memorial minute, the visit sharpened his interest in how a child's real environment shapes its development and drew him away from the purely internal factors central to the Freudian position (Harvard memorial minute¹).

In 1939 he moved to the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of California to work on a longitudinal study of adolescents. He was uneasy with its quantitative, team-based approach, and by 1944 he was in full-time private practice in the San Francisco area, where he wrote Childhood and Society. That book drew on his fieldwork among the Sioux and among the Yurok of northern California (Childhood and Society²). During the Second World War he coined the term identity crisis for veterans at the Mount Zion Veterans' Rehabilitation Clinic in San Francisco who had lost their sense of personal sameness and continuity. He recalled the origin of the term in the prologue to Identity: Youth and Crisis⁵. In 1950 he refused to sign the loyalty oath newly required of the University of California faculty. His defence of that refusal persuaded the authorities to let him keep his appointment, but he resigned in 1951 (Harvard memorial minute¹).

Erikson was on the staff of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge from 1951 to 1960, and he remained a consultant there until 1973. At Riggs, Joan Erikson founded the Activities Program and the nursery school, both of which were still running in 2022 (Erik Erikson at 120⁶). In the same years he consulted for Benjamin Spock's Arsenal School and for the Western Psychiatric Institute, both affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh, where he held the title of professor. He also developed his method of psychobiography. Wanting more time for writing and teaching than clinical work left him, he accepted a Harvard professorship of human development in 1960, together with a lectureship in psychiatry at the Medical School. At Harvard he taught a popular undergraduate course on the human life cycle and a graduate seminar on psychobiography. He retired as professor emeritus in 1970, and in 1972 he returned to give the Godkin Lectures, later published as Toys and Reasons. Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws in 1978. He died at Harwich, Massachusetts, in May 1994, and was survived by his wife and three of their four children (Harvard memorial minute¹).

Erikson started from Sigmund Freud's theory of the libidinal stages of psychosexual development and widened it from the zones of the body to the social tasks of each period of life. In Childhood and Society he recast the libidinal stages as a scheme of zones and modes. Each bodily zone carries a mode of approach, such as taking in, holding on, letting go or intruding, and each mode becomes a pattern of social behaviour. He read a case history on three interlocking levels, the organism, the ego and society, none of which explains a symptom on its own. Every society, he argued, meets the child's bodily stages with its own methods of child training, suited to its economy and its image of the world. Among the Sioux and the Yurok he showed how the child training of a buffalo-hunting and of a salmon-fishing people fitted their ways of life. The Sioux, cut off from their historical way of life, were left without an identity they could live by (Childhood and Society²).

The chapter "Eight Ages of Man" in the same book set out the life cycle as eight stages, each posing a crisis between two outcomes. They are basic trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, identity versus role confusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and ego integrity versus despair (Childhood and Society²). The memorial minute notes that the first five stages correspond to Freud's, and that Erikson added the last three, those of young adulthood, adulthood and maturity (Harvard memorial minute¹). Under the epigenetic principle that orders the scheme, each stage has its own time of ascendancy but depends on how earlier stages were resolved. Late in life Erikson restated the scheme in The Life Cycle Completed⁷ (1982). There he gave the basic strength that each stage yields and paid closer attention to old age and to the relation between the generations.

Identity was the centre of the scheme. Erikson first used the term ego identity in "Ego Development and Historical Change" (1946) and treated it most fully in "The Problem of Ego Identity" (1956). Both papers were reprinted in Identity and the Life Cycle⁸ (1959). In Childhood and Society he defined the task of adolescence as an inner sense of sameness and continuity that matches the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for others. The failure of this task he called role confusion. In the 1956 paper he described it as identity diffusion, and later he preferred the term identity confusion. Society, in his account, grants the young a psychosocial moratorium, a delay of adult commitments in which roles and beliefs can be tried out. Identity: Youth and Crisis⁵ (1968) was his fullest statement of the theory. It covers identity formation across the life cycle, the adolescent crisis and its pathological forms, and identity in relation to race, gender and the youth movements of the 1960s. In middle adulthood the theme is generativity, the concern with establishing and guiding the next generation.

Erikson also carried the idea of identity from the individual into history. The last part of Childhood and Society reads the polarities of American identity, Hitler's imagery of his own childhood and a Soviet film of Maxim Gorky's youth as expressions of national identities. Young Man Luther⁹ (1958) reads Luther's crisis in the monastery as a prolonged identity crisis and moratorium, whose resolution became a turning point in religious history. Gandhi's Truth³ (1969) centres on the Ahmedabad textile strike of 1918. It traces how Gandhi's generativity in middle life, and his method of nonviolent resistance, grew out of his personal history and his times. Both books read a leader's personal crises together with the historical crises of the age, and they became the model for psychohistory.

Erikson's work has been placed within ego psychology. In his historical introduction to Identity and the Life Cycle, David Rapaport located the psychosocial theory within the ego psychology founded by Heinz Hartmann and linked it to Hartmann's concern with adaptation (Identity and the Life Cycle⁸). The memorial minute, by contrast, stresses how far he moved from the internal dynamic factors of Freudian theory. It also records that Young Man Luther had a controversial reception: professional historians criticised its history, and some psychoanalysts saw it as a major break with Freudian doctrine. In the minute's judgement, his psychobiographical method nonetheless won a place in biographical writing (Harvard memorial minute¹).

Within clinical psychoanalysis, Otto Kernberg took up identity diffusion in Borderline Personality Organization¹⁰ (1967). There the lack of an integrated concept of the self and of others became one of the structural criteria of borderline personality organization. The memorial minute names the continuance of development throughout the life cycle as Erikson's best-remembered contribution. Clinicians at the Austen Riggs Center, where an Erikson Institute was founded in his name in 1994, describe a similar legacy. Jane Tillman credits him with countering Freud's view that development stops at puberty, while noting that later scholars have challenged and revised his framework. Eric Plakun sees his influence in today's recognition of the social determinants of mental health (Erik Erikson at 120⁶).

Erikson's books include Childhood and Society (1950, revised and enlarged in 1963); Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958); Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers (1959), published as the first monograph of the series Psychological Issues; Insight and Responsibility (1964); Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968); Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969); Toys and Reasons, from his Godkin Lectures of 1972; and The Life Cycle Completed: A Review (1982).