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See Also

See Also:

Developmental psychology;

Ego psychology: Erik H. Erikson;

Identity crises;

Midlife crisis;

Personality theory.

Psychology & Behavioral Health

Erikson, Erik H.

by Jack Carter

Born: June 15, 1902, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Died: May 12, 1994, in Harwich, Massachusetts

Identity: German-born American developmental psychoanalyst

Type of psychology: Developmental psychology

Erikson was an innovator of the psychosocial theory of human development, who emphasized developmental change throughout the human life cycle through a series of eight developmental stages.

Erik H. Erikson was born in west-central Germany. His mother, a single parent, married Erik's pediatrician, Theodor Homburger, when Erik was three. Erikson took his stepfather's name and remained Erik Homburger throughout his childhood and into early adulthood. The details of his birth were kept secret, an aspect of Erikson's life that influenced his work.

The twenty-five-year-old Erikson acquired a position in Vienna as an art teacher at a private school that was founded by Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. With her encouragement, Erikson graduated from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1933, where he studied under Sigmund Freud. That same year, Erikson moved to the United States, obtained a teaching position at the Harvard Medical School, and became the first child analyst in Boston, Massachusetts. He officially changed his name to Erik H. Erikson on receiving his American citizenship. After leaving Harvard, he taught at Yale, and later at the University of California at Berkeley.

Erikson was interested in the influence of society and culture on child development. To help formulate his theories, he studied groups of Native American children in the United States. Through these studies he was able to correlate personality growth with parental and societal values. This research formed the basis for Childhood and Society (1950), which includes the “eight stages of psychosocial development,”Psychosocial development theory for which Erikson is best known.

Erikson emphasized developmental change throughout the human life cycle. He claimed that human beings develop through eight distinctive psychological stages spread over their entire life cycle. He further stated that each stage had a certain set of “crises” that must be resolved before moving on to the next stage. He believed that humans must complete each stage in successive order before entering the next, and that failure to successfully complete earlier stages could hinder their potential success in later stages.

Erikson's later studies centered on personal human development and social history. It was these psychohistorical studies that won him a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1969 for Ghandi's Truth: On the Origin of Militant Nonviolence.

After his formal retirement in 1970, Erikson continued to lecture and write essays and books. Following a brief illness, he died in 1994 in Harwich, Massachusetts, at the age of ninety-one.Erikson, Erik H.

Bibliography

1 

Bloland, Sue Erikson. In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson. New York: Penguin, 2006. The daughter of Erikson, herself a psychotherapist and a faculty member at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, recounts her life with her father, who was in private a complex and insecure man and in public a renowned thinker and seeker of fame.

2 

Friedman, Lawrence Jacob. Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. A meticulous biography by historian Friedman, who worked with Erikson and his wife in the years immediately preceding Erikson's death in 1994.

3 

Stevens, Richard. Erik Erikson: Exploring the Life Cycle, Identity, and Psychohistory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Analyzes the work of Erikson and explains his contributions to the understanding of childhood and the life cycle.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Carter, Jack. "Erikson, Erik H.." Psychology & Behavioral Health, edited by Paul Moglia, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=PBH_0226.
APA 7th
Carter, J. (2015). Erikson, Erik H.. In P. Moglia (Ed.), Psychology & Behavioral Health. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Carter, Jack. "Erikson, Erik H.." Edited by Paul Moglia. Psychology & Behavioral Health. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.