1. Erik Erikson Erik Erikson AKA Erik Homburger Erikson
Born: 15-Jun-1902 Birthplace: Frankfurt am Main, Germany Died: 12-May-1994 Location of death: Harwich, MA Cause of death: unspecified
Gender: Male Religion: Jewish Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Psychologist
Nationality: United States Executive summary: Eight Stages of Childhood
Erik Erikson was an influential and pioneering psychologist, psychoanalyst, and author whose theory of the eight psychosocial stages of development profoundly shaped the field of child development. Although his best-known work is the now classic Childhood and Society (1950), additional facets of his theory were elaborated in such works as Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968) and Young Man Luther (1958). Gandhi's Truth (1969), which focused more on his theory as applied to later phases in the life cycle, garnered Erikson the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Although highly original, Erikson’s work shows heavy influences from the work of Sigmund and Anna Freud, as well as from the field of cultural anthropology.
Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany on June 15, 1902 to Karla Abrahamsen, a young Jewish woman. Although married, she was living her family at the time of the birth, having moved in after leaving her husband, Valdemar Salomonsen. A Jewish stockbroker, Salomonsen had fled the country four years earlier in connection with fraud and criminal ties. Karla Abrahamsen had engaged in an extramarital affair in his absence and become pregnant. She never disclosed the specific identity of her son’s biological father, merely that he was of Danish extraction. She listed her son's surname as "Salomonsen". Four months later, word arrived that she was newly a widow; Valdemar Salomonsen was dead.
Abrahamsen trained as a nurse and eventually remarried, when young Erik was about three years old. Erik's new stepfather was his pediatrician, Theodor Homburger. Homburger, who insisted on being referred to as Erik’s father, conferred his surname on the boy in 1908 and finally adopted him in Despite this it became apparent, with the arrival of three half sisters, that Erik held a very different place in the family as the adopted stepson. Throughout adolescence he increasingly identified as an outsider, both within and in the local community. He was teased at school for being Jewish, and at synagogue for being tall and blond. His stepfather refused to accept his intense artistic inclinations.
When Erik finished gymnasium, he refused to go to medical school (as his stepfather wished) and abandoned home to enroll in Baden State Art School. A year later, he took experimented with travel. Ultimately, he ended up in Vienna where, among other things, he painted children’s portraits. A friend, Peter Blos, recommended that Erik expand on this by tutoring and teaching art at a school run by Dorothy Burlingham, a friend of Anna Freud, daughter and intellectual heir of the famed Sigmund Freud. The Hietzing School, as it was called, was organized along psychoanalytic principles, and many of the students were the children of Freud’s patients and friends.
Seeing Erikson's skill with children, Anna Freud began mentoring him. (Note that he was actually still Erik Homburger at the time). His training, which included regular psychoanalytic sessions with Ms. Freud, resulted in a certificate from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. At the same time he attended classes at the University of Vienna, and also earned his teaching degree and a certificate in the Montessori method. He continued to teach, to become more involved in psychoanalysis. He also became married to Joan Serson a dance teacher at the Hietzing School. Eventually, economic pressures and the rise of the Nazis prompted the couple, which now had two sons, to move to Copenhagen, and then to the U.S.
Erikson's initial efforts to set up shop in the U.S. as a child psychoanalyst were at first stymied by his lack of an advanced degree. So he worked for a time as an assistant professor and research assistant at Harvard and Yale. He took some graduate level courses, but ultimately it was his ties with members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that won him professional acceptance. He moved to the San Francisco Bay area, and took a position as a research associate and a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. Soon he was able to start his practice, at last, eventually becoming an important member of the bay area's psychoanalytic community, and even serving as president of the San Francisco Society and Institute in 1950.
Meanwhile he had applied for U.S. citizenship, which was granted in 1939, and he had legally changed his last name to Erikson. Supposedly the named choice was influenced by his eldest son who liked the idea of continuing the Scandinavian tradition of being bearing the father’s name as part of the surname. However there is some very slight indication that "Erik" may have been the name of his own biological father as well.
More significantly, it was during his period at Berkeley that Erikson began his groundbreaking research into childhood and childrearing among the Lakota and the Yurok tribes. Influenced both by the work of cultural anthropologists like Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson, as well as by the theories of Sigmund Freud and his own experience with psychoanalysis, Erikson began formulating his own highly fertile and original viewpoint on child development.
He stayed in many ways true to the psychoanalytic assumptions grounded in Sigmund Freud, but there were differences as well. He accepted Freudian notions such as the ego and the Oedipal complex and the development of the self through various stages. But rather than rely entirely on universal drives from within the psyche to explain cognitive development and personality, he integrated information from anthropology about the role played by society and culture. In short, children within each culture learn different values, different goals, and receive vastly different kinds of nurturing and guidance. These influences powerfully shape how the psyche of the child develops and influences how he/she will navigate the typical challenges presented by psychological and physical development.
But despite such differences from one society to the next, Erikson was able to elaborate a theory of development that was also universal. He perceived that there were eight distinct phases of development (in contrast to Freud’s five). The stages were Trust vs. Mistrust, Autonomy vs. Shame & Doubt, Initiative vs. Guilt, Industry vs. Inferiority, Identity vs. Role Confusion, Intimacy vs. Isolation, Generativity vs. Stagnation, and Integrity vs. Despair. To be negotiated successfully, the individual must find the balance of each value. That is he must, for example be able to feel a healthy degree of trust while maintaing enough "distrust" to avoid gullability.
In addition, while Freud’s stages of development focused only on the period from birth to age five (as he believed personality was fully formed by that time), Erikson saw growth and development as something that stretched throughout the life cycle. According to Erikson there were various "crises" that developed naturally and inevitably at various points in the life cycle. Successful resolution of these crises would determine whether one later experienced relative happiness, or discontent and neurosis. In addition, each of the different phases -- and the skills that came from resolving each successive crisis -- built upon those that came before.
One value of this theory is that it illuminated why individuals who had been thwarted in the healthy resolution of early phases (such as in learning healthy levels of trust and autonomy in toddlerhood) had such a tough time of it with the crises that came in adulthood. More importantly, it did so in a way that provided answers for practical application. It raised new potential for therapists and their patients to identify key issues and skills that required addressing. But at the same time, it yielded a guide or yardstick that could be used to assess teaching and child rearing practices in terms of their ability to nurture and facilitate healthy emotional and cognitive development.
In fact, Erikson’s contributions to the field of child development are only matched in impact and significance by the work of Jean Piaget. Like Piaget, Erikson came to the conclusion that children should not be rushed in their development; that each developmental phase was vastly important and should be allowed time to fully unfold. While Piaget emphasized that cognitive development could not be rushed (without sacrificing full intellectual potential), Erikson emphasized that a child's development must not be rushed, or dire emotional harm would be done, harm that would seriously undermine a child’s ability to succeed in life.
Ironically, Erikson, whose work has done so much to promote the healthy emotional and cognitive nurturance of children, had a mentally handicapped son, Neil, who lived his entire 21 years discarded in an institution. Born with severe Down Syndrome and physical handicaps, Neil Erikson was predicted by doctors to live for no more than one to two years. His parents, busy intellectuals with three more children at home to care for, conceded to the doctor’s recommendation and institutionalized their son. They told the other children that Neil had died. Eventually however the truth resurfaced. Before and after, it was a source of friction within the household. Erikson's biographer, Lawrence J. Friedman, has pointed out that the life of his youngest child may have served as a constant contrasting back drop for both Joan and Erik Erikson as they co-developed the theories of healthy child development that eventually emerged in Childhood and Society
Even as the book came out and he achieved promotion to professorship, Erikson left his position at U.C. Berkeley in order to sidestep a (McCarthy era) demand that all professors sign an oath of loyalty. He moved to Massachusetts to work at the Austen Riggs Center, and then, in 1960, accepted a professorship at Harvard, where he remained until his retirement. Erikson continued, throughout most of his life, to heavily identify as a writer and to produce significant books and papers. His excellence in this area was acknowledge upon the publication of his extensive work on the life and personality of Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi's Truth: the book earned him both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. After his retirement from Harvard in 1970, Erikson continued writing, doing research, and occasionally lecturing. But in 1980 serious health problems (including prostate cancer) forced him into full retirement. He died in 1994 at the age of 91, passing peacefully in his sleep.
Mother: Karla Abrahamsen Father: Dr. Theodor Homberger (stepfather) Wife: Joan Serson Son: Kai T. Erikson Son: Jon MacDonald Daughter: Sue Son: Neil (down syndrome)
    Professor: Harvard Medical School ( )     Professor: Yale Medical School ( )     Professor: University of California at Berkeley ( )
Author of books: Childhood and Society (1950, psychology) Young Man Luther (1958, psychology) Insight and Responsibility (1964, psychology) Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968, psychology) Gandhi's Truth (1969, psychology) Dimensions of a New Identity (1974, psychology) Life History and the Historical Moment (1975, psychology) The Life Cycle Completed (1987, psychology, with J.M. Erikson)

2. Erik Erikson was born June 15, 1902 in Frankfurt, Germany
Erik Erikson was born June 15, 1902 in Frankfurt, Germany. His father, a Danish man, abandoned the family before he was born. His young, Jewish mother later married a physician, Dr. Theodor Homberger

3.  Erik Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development
8 Stages of Life to Overcome Understand.

5. His interest in identity developed early based upon his own experiences in school. At his temple school, the other children teased him for being Nordic because he was tall, blonde, and blue-eyed. At grammar school, he was rejected because of his Jewish background.
Brief Biography of Erik Erikson  
Erik Erikson
Erik Erikson was a prominent psychologist who made numerous contributions to the field of psychology.  Erikson is perhaps best known for developing the concept of an Identity Crisis.  While practicing and teaching in California, the young Dr. Eric Berne became an analyst of Erikson.  While Berne made his greatest achievements after studying with Erikson, the influence of Erikson on Berne and Transactional Analysis should not be underestimated.
Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany on June 15, 1902.  Erikson's biological father, who was Danish, had left before Erikson was born. He was adopted by his Jewish stepfather, and took the name Erik Homberger. But because of his blond-and-blue-eyed Nordic look, Erikson was rejected by his Jewish neighbors. At grammar school, on the other hand, he was teased for being Jewish. Feeling not fitting in with either culture, Erikson's identity crises began at an early age.
As a young adult in Europe, Erikson was both an artist and a teacher in the late 1920's when he met Anna Freud and began to study child psychoanalyses from her and at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute.  With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, Erikson immigrated to the United States in He obtained a position at the Harvard Medical School, and later on, held positions at institutions including Yale, Berkeley, the Menninger Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, and the Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco.
Erikson possessed a special interest in the influence of society and culture on child development.  This interest led him to study groups of American Indian children. This research enabled him to correlate personality growth with parental and societal values.  Erikson was also concerned with the effects of the rapid social changes in America.  He analyzed these changes on many aspects, including the generation gap, racial tensions, juvenile delinquency, changing sexual roles, and the dangers of nuclear war. Erikson is credited for widening the scope of psychoanalytic theory to take greater account of social, cultural, and other environmental factors.
According to Erikson's stages, the onset of the identity crisis is in the teenage years, and only individuals who succeed in resolving the crisis will be ready to face future challenges in life. But the identity crisis may well be recurring, as the changing world demands us to constantly redefine ourselves. Erikson suggested that people experience an identity crisis when they lose "a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity". Given today's rapid development in technology, global economy, dynamics in local and world politics, identity crises are expected to be more common now than 30 years ago, when Erikson formed his theory.
Dr. Eric Berne had the distinct privilege to work with Erikson when Erikson was working in the San Francisco area.  Berne had recently relocated from Connecticut to California.  Even though Berne proposed his theories of Transactional Analysis long after he stopped working with Erikson, the analytical skills that Berne learned through Erikson are evident in this theory. Berne went on to achieve both critical and commercial success with Games People Play.  For information on Erikson's most popular works, please see the links below.

6. Erikson and wife,

8. Midway through this compelling memoir, Bloland, the daughter of renowned psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, relates one of her father’s favorite jokes: “the story of the psychoanalyst’s daughter who, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, answered, ‘A patient.’” Bloland’s book, In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson, chronicles her life as the psychoanalyst’s daughter, virtually ignored by her father, himself author of the groundbreaking Childhood and Sociology. In contrast to the public impression of Erikson as a benevolent, wise father, in reality he was an ineffectual, distant parent, who craved the public limelight more than the company of his own family.
“My father became famous when I was thirteen,” Bloland’s narrative begins. She recounts how her father, whose talent was recognized by Sigmund and daughter Anna Freud, ascended the academic ranks to become an intellectual giant, extending Freudian childhood theory to encompass adult stages of development. His eloquent writing style and charismatic public personality garnered him an extensive following. As a result, he was in great demand as a lecturer, professor, and writer; his book, Gandhi’s Truth, would win the 1970 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Joan, Erikson’s wife and Bloland’s mother, was a dancer and determined student who cast herself in the role of the consummate helpmate and hostess, subordinating her own talents--she earned an M.A. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and would eventually author five books--to nurturing her husband’s career. Bloland’s mother entertained and edited, cared for the children and managed the household, while Erikson “lived in a special universe that he referred to as ‘my work,’ the physical locus of which was his study.” For all was not as the public perceived in the Erikson home: “From there he visited us for events like dinner but like anyone visiting from another universe, he found family life rather alien and was awkward and uncomfortable around us.”
In perhaps the most fascinating chapter, “My Parents’ Childhoods,” Bloland, herself a practicing psychotherapist, articulately conveys the origins of Erikson’s obsessive drive for recognition and approval. The story is indeed fascinating. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1902, Erikson was an illegitimate child of a Jewish woman abandoned by both her first husband and Erikson’s father. Banished by her own family, she would never, for the rest of her life, reveal the identity of Erikson’s father. Erikson’s mother eventually married Theodor Homburger, a pediatrician of Jewish descent, who was dutiful to the boy, but never completely welcomed him as his own son, even though the boy was led to believe that his stepfather was his biological father. The young boy’s confusion over his Jewish heritage and strikingly blonde appearance created social disharmony throughout his early childhood years, and he was greatly teased as a “goy.” He eventually learned through relatives that his biological father was of Danish descent. Feeling greatly betrayed and deceived, Erikson grew up with delusions of a fantasy father of Danish nobility, with great physical, artistic, and intellectual prowess. His drive to distance himself from his origins culminated in a name change to Erikson. In effect, Erikson was “reborn” in his own image, not unlike the woman he would marry, who was born Sarah, called Sally, but “hated” both of her given names and chose the name Joan.
The complex relationship between Erikson and Joan is at once profoundly productive and destructive. Early in the narrative, we learn of the contrived deception surrounding the Erikson’s fourth child, Neil, born with Down’s Syndrome. Neil was institutionalized (never even to be brought home) and Bloland and her two brothers told that Neil died at birth. It was a secret the parents did not readily share; many of their closest friends only learned of Neil’s existence after the publication of Lawrence J. Friedman’s biography of Erikson. Bloland herself would not know of Neil’s existence until she was 13; sadly, and under the emotional influence of her parents, she never met her brother, who eventually died in the institution. In a particularly chilling moment, we learn of the parents’ reaction to Neil’s death, Joan’s furtive whispering on the phone, their failure to return from Italy after receiving the news, the delegation of the funeral duties to Bloland and her brothers, and the parents’ decision not to attend Neil’s funeral.
Of her parents’ behavior towards the children, Bloland’s tone is circumspect, often expressing sadness and disappointment but never condemnation. She is remarkably forgiving of her parents, even as she associates her own personal difficulties with the alienation she experienced as a child. The narrative, at times, reflects the struggle to retell the story. The descriptions of her family members often take on grandiose, improbable heights, as in the description of her parents’ fairytale-like meeting or the cloying description of brothers Kai and Jon: “Girls’ knees tended to buckle when they encountered either one of my gorgeous brothers.” The first few pages are especially challenging as we are abruptly plunged into Erikson’s fame, splashes of psychological theory, and the sudden revelation of Neil. In later chapters, Bloland’s symbol-laden dreams seem conveniently ripe for psychoanalytic interpretation. However, these detractors, which have earned unfair criticism, do convey the tremendous distance between Bloland and her family. She was truly in the shadow, not only of her father, but of a preoccupied mother and idealized brothers. In acknowledging the help of her brothers in preparing the book, Bloland thanks them for their “extraordinary source of support and guidance, respectful of the ways in which my personal experience of our family life has differed from theirs but responsive to the book in a way that has touched me deeply I am very grateful to both of them.” She is still the little girl in awe.
The monolithic father and larger-than-life family members cast an intimidating shadow where Bloland resides. It would be easy for the narrative to dissolve into a plea for sympathy for her lonely, alienated childhood as her parents shunted her from one boarding school to another: “I attended an orientation session and looked for them afterwards to tell them what I had learned—trying to be optimistic and prepared to be very brave when it came time for good-byes. I was shocked to learn that my parents had already left ” But she does not ask for our sympathy. Instead, Bloland carefully, and at times even clinically, recounts her experiences. Telling the story is a difficult journey for anyone to undergo, and it’s understandable why she waited until the publication of the Friedman biography of Erikson and the deaths of her parents to share some of the somber, even macabre truth of her family’s private history.
Bloland’s assessment of her family is disarmingly honest, and she does not exclude herself from the critique. Although a bright and promising student, she repeatedly acknowledges that she is not her father’s intellectual heir. She spent her early adult years wandering through graduate school programs and ambivalent about career aspirations, casting herself as amanuenses: “I could think of nothing more humiliating than to reveal my intellectual limitations to the world. So it was much safer to stand behind the front lines—to be a good secretary and to serve as helpmate to my husband—than to expose myself to comparison with my world-famous father. On the other hand (of course), I harbored secret fantasies of my own person greatness—an inevitable defense against the feelings of inadequacy that plagued me.” It is an interesting parallel track of both her mother as helpmate and her father as keeper of delusions of grandeur.
It was only after Bloland decided to enter therapy (her parents, always the analysts, never the patients, were “startled and alarmed” at the news) that she finally started to make sense of her experience. The eventual result was the essay “Fame: The Power and Cost of a Fantasy,” published in The Atlantic Monthly. However, familiarity with this essay, Erikson, and an advanced understanding of psychology aren’t necessary—Memoirs is delightfully free of the academic jargon and pedantry that would otherwise bog down the general reader’s experience. And that’s to our benefit, because the importance of this book is beyond the personal. Shadow of Fame is not only about the Erikson family; it examines a society obsessed with fame, the cult of celebrity, and the devaluation of an ordinary life. Celebrities, in turn, must sustain that level of applause, and, as Bloland tells us, often to the detriment of those closest to them. In the end, Bloland offers no final judgments, just a humble acknowledgment of her working through the process, one which she invites us to share. At a time when the publishing industry and the public are casting a cautious eye over memoirs and works of purported nonfiction, it is refreshing to spend time with a work of such candor.