Famous experiments by erik erikson biography

American psychoanalyst and essayist (1902-1994)

For other people with similar names, see Eric Erickson (disambiguation).

Erik Homburger Erikson (born Erik Salomonsen; 15 June 1902 – 12 May 1994) was a Danish-German-Jewish child psychoanalyst and visual artist known for his theory on psychosocial development of human beings. He coined the phrase identity crisis.

Despite lacking a university degree, Erikson served as a professor at prominent institutions, including Harvard, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Erikson as the 12th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.

Early life

Erikson's mother, Karla Abrahamsen, came from a prominent Jewish family in Copenhagen, Denmark. She was married to Jewish stockbroker Valdemar Isidor Salomonsen but had been estranged from him for several months at the time Erik was conceived. Little is known about Erik's biological father except that he was a non-Jewish Dane. On discovering her pregnancy, Karla fled to Frankfurt am Main in Germany where Erik was born on 15 June 1902 and was given the surname Salomonsen. She fled due to conceiving Erik out of wedlock, and the identity of Erik's birth father was never made clear.

Following Erik's birth, Karla trained to be a nurse and moved to Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1905 she married a Jewish pediatrician, Theodor Homburger. In 1908, Erik Salomonsen's name was changed to Erik Homburger, and in 1911 he was officially adopted by his stepfather. Karla and Theodor told Erik that Theodor was his real father, only revealing the truth to him in late childhood; he remained bitter about the deception all his life.

The development of identity seems to have been one of Erikson's greatest concerns in his own life as well as being central to his theoretical work. As an older adult, he wrote about his adolescent "identity confusion" in his

Erik Erikson’s relationship with Harvard spanned decades, coinciding with some of his most influential works.  Born in Frankfurt, and trained in psychoanalysis in Vienna by Anna Freud, Erikson came to Boston in 1933.  He accepted an appointment as a research associate at the Harvard Psychological Clinic; in conjunction with that position Erikson started to work on a graduate degree in psychology at Harvard.  Finding himself at odds with the quantitative, empirical focus of Harvard’s Psychology Department, Erikson discontinued his studies in 1936 without finishing his degree.  For the next two decades he pursued his interests in human development by conducting research at Yale and Berkeley, as well as continuing his private psychoanalytic practice.

Erikson’s humanist theory of psychosocial development deviated significantly from the traditional Freudian psychosexual theory of human development in two ways. Erikson believed that humans’ personalities continued to develop past the age of five, and he believed that the development of personality depended directly on the resolution of existential crises like trust, autonomy, intimacy, individuality, integrity, and identity (which were viewed in traditional psychoanalytic theory as mere by-products of the resolution of sexual crises). Erikson’s highly influential eight-stage theory of development also expanded Freud’s original five stages to encompass the years of life after early childhood. Within this theory, Erikson introduced and described the characteristics of adolescent identity crisis and the adult’s midlife crisis.

Despite his lack of a doctorate, Erikson returned to Harvard in 1960 as Professor of Human Development and Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, and was invited to be an unofficial member of the Department of Social Relations.  There he taught popular undergraduate and graduate courses on human development. In the ensuing decade Erikson

Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst and developmental psychologist, helped reshape how we think about human development. In his theory of psychosocial development, Erikson framed development as a series of conflicts that take place at various points during our lives.

The social challenges of childhood, the search for identity in adolescence, and the ups and downs of finding love in adulthood are just a few examples. How we cope with each of these conflicts determines the psychological virtues we develop.

What made Erikson so notable was that his theories marked a significant shift in how we think about personality. Rather than only focusing on early childhood events, his psychosocial theory looked at how social influences contributed to our personalities *throughout* our entire lives.

Erikson's stage theory of psychosocial development generated interest and research on human development through the lifespan. An ego psychologist who studied with Anna Freud, Erikson expanded psychoanalytic theory by exploring development throughout life, including events of childhood, adulthood, and old age.

The Life of Erik Erickson

Erik Erickson's own life helped shape many of his theories. Learning more about his childhood and later experiences can provide a better understanding of what led him to develop an interest in and create his psychological theories. Here's what we know.

Childhood

Erik Erikson was born on June 15, 1902, in Frankfurt, Germany. His young Jewish mother, Karla Abrahamsen, raised Erik by herself for a time before marrying a physician, Dr. Theodore Homberger.

Eight-stage model of psychoanalytic development

Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, as articulated in the second half of the 20th century by Erik Erikson in collaboration with Joan Erikson, is a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory that identifies a series of eight stages that a healthy developing individual should pass through from infancy to late adulthood.

According to Erikson's theory the results from each stage, whether positive or negative, influence the results of succeeding stages. Erikson published a book called Childhood and Society in 1950 that highlighted his research on the eight stages of psychosocial development. Erikson was originally influenced by Sigmund Freud's psychosexual stages of development. He began by working with Freud's theories specifically, but as he began to dive deeper into biopsychosocial development and how other environmental factors affect human development, he soon progressed past Freud's theories and developed his own ideas. Erikson developed different substantial ways to create a theory about lifespan he theorized about the nature of personality development as it unfolds from birth through old age or death. He argued that the social experience was valuable throughout our life to each stage that can be recognizable by a conflict specifically as we encounter between the psychological needs and the surroundings of the social environment.

Erikson's stage theory characterizes an individual advancing through the eight life stages as a function of negotiating their biological and sociocultural forces. The two conflicting forces each have a psychosocial crisis which characterizes the eight stages. If an individual does indeed successfully reconcile these forces (favoring the first mentioned attribute in the crisis), they emerge from the stage with the corresponding virtue. For ex