Erik Erikson at 120: Social Approach to Mental Health Proves Enduring

A news article by John Zollinger, published by the Austen Riggs Center on 15 June 2022 to mark the 120th anniversary of Erik H. Erikson's birth. It argues that Erikson's attention to both the social and the psychological influences on mental health remains relevant now that the field is turning to the social determinants of mental health, to access to care and to more diverse populations. It recalls Childhood and Society (1950), with its eight stages of development across the whole of life, and Erikson's years at Riggs, on the staff from 1951 to 1960 and as a consultant until 1973, when his view that people both shape and are shaped by their surroundings became a central organising idea of the institution. Three Riggs clinicians comment on his legacy. Jane Tillman, director of the Erikson Institute founded in his name in 1994, notes that where Freud saw development as ending at puberty, Erikson extended it through the whole of life, an idea she holds to be still vital though it has since been challenged and revised. Eric M. Plakun, the center's medical director, sees his influence in today's recognition of the social determinants of mental health. Stephen Schlein, a Riggs Fellow who studied with him in 1971–1973, describes his interpersonal and relational way of working, the subject of Schlein's book The Clinical Erik Erikson. The article also describes current Riggs programmes that it ties to these values, the Activities Program and nursery school founded by Joan Erikson, and the Erikson collections held in the Riggs archives.