Erik Erikson: Faculty of Arts and Sciences Memorial Minute

The memorial minute on Erik H. Erikson (1902–1994) that Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences placed on its records at its meeting of 12 February 2002, printed in the Harvard Gazette on 7 March 2002 and submitted by Robert Coles, Richard M. Hunt and Brendan A. Maher (chair). It traces his life from his birth in Frankfurt in 1902 to a Danish Jewish mother, his first surname Homburger, and his art studies in Karlsruhe and Munich, to Vienna. There, from 1927, he taught at a small school Anna Freud ran for children of the Freudian circle, was analysed by her and trained as a child analyst. In 1933, once fully admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, he gave up the medical studies he had begun and emigrated with his family to the United States. The minute then follows his American posts: a psychoanalytic practice in Cambridge with appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Judge Baker Clinic and the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and graduate study in psychology at Harvard, which he left without a degree in 1936; Yale's Institute of Human Relations, and a stay with the Oglala Sioux at Pine Ridge that turned his attention to the part the environment plays in child development; the University of California's Institute of Child Welfare from 1939 and private practice near San Francisco, where he wrote Childhood and Society; his refusal of the Berkeley loyalty oath in 1950 and his move in 1951 to the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, where he developed psychobiography. From 1960 to 1970 he was Harvard's professor of human development, teaching an undergraduate course on the human life cycle and a graduate seminar on psychobiography, and he received honorary degrees though he held no degree of his own. Among his later books the minute names Insight and Responsibility, Identity: Youth and Crisis, Gandhi's Truth and Toys and Reasons, which grew out of his Godkin lectures of 1972. It credits him with extending development across the whole life cycle in eight stages, the first five corresponding to Freud's, with a lifelong struggle for identity that reaches a crisis in adolescence, and with a psychobiographical method that came to influence biographical writing. It dates Young Man Luther to 1954, against the first edition of 1958. Erikson died in Harwich, Massachusetts, in May 1994.