Erik Erikson
Born at the tun of the century, Erik Erikson spent his early years in Europe. As a son of well-to-do parents, he received an education that was both formal and informal. Like other upper class children, when he finished his regular schoolwork, he traveled the Continent. He described this period as his moratorium—a term he used in his later theory of human development to describe a temporary life space that adolescents go through between the completion of general academic education and the choice of a life career. He noted that at the time of his own young adulthood, it was fashionable to travel through Europe, gaining a perspective on civilization and one’s own possible place in it. He chose the avocation of portrait painting as an activity during this time. It permitted maximum flexibility for travel and yielded some productive output as well. Obviously talented, he soon gained a reputation as a promising young artist, especially for his portraits of young children.
The turning point in his life came when he was invited to a villa in Austria to do a child’s portrait. He entered the villa and was introduced to the child’s father, Sigmund Freud. These began a series of informal discussions as he completed his work. A few weeks later, he received a written invitation from Freud to join the psychoanalytic institute of Vienna and study for child analysis. Erikson has commented that that at this point he confronted a momentous decision: the choice between a continued moratorium with more traveling and painting, and commitment to a life career pattern. Fortunately for psychology and particularly for our eventual understanding of children and adolescents, Erikson ended the moratorium.
After completing his training, he migrated to this country and served from 1936 to 1939 as a research associate in psychiatry at Yale, and he worked with Henry Murray of TAT fame (Thematic Apperception Test) at Harvard. From 1939 to 1951 he served as professor at the University of California and then moved to the Austen Riggs Clinic in Pittsburgh. With each move, his reputation grew in significance. His theoretical framework was adopted by the White House Conference on Children in 1950. The conference report, a national charter for child and adolescent development in this country, was almost a literal repetition of his thoughts. In 1960 he was offered a university professorship a Harvard in recognition of his national and international stature in the field of human development. The career that started so informally that day at Freud’s villa culminated with almost unprecedented eminence as a professor in one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious institutions of higher education-all without the benefit of a single earned academic degree. Ironically, he was offered only associate status in the American Psychological Association as late as 1950. This oversight was partially removed in 1955 when he was elected as a Fellow of the Division of Developmental Psychology, without ever having been a member.
His work, as we have noted in the text, has made a major contribution to our understanding of healthy psychological growth during all aspects of the life cycle. In addition to the high quality of his insight, Erikson possessed a genuine flair in linguistic expression, both spoken and written. In fact, one could almost compare his command of the English language with the benchmark established in this century by Winston Churchill. In many ways Erikson’s scope was as broad and comprehensive as that of Churchill. Erikson’s genius has been his ability to see the threefold relationship among the person, the immediate environment, and historical forces. Thus, each human is partially shaped by environmental and historical events, but each human, in turn, shapes the environment and can change the course of history. Erikson is equally at home describing the balance of individual strengths and problems for a single "verage" child or teenager as with an analysis of major historical figures such as Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandihi. He shows through personal history how events and reactions during childhood and adolescence prepare humans to be adults. Ralph Waldo Emerson said there is no history, only biography. Erikson’s work attests to this wisdom.
If there were a criticism of his overall framework, it would concern his differentiation between the sexes. As might be expected, he was conditioned and shaped by the major historical and psychological forces of his own time, following in the tradition of a predominantly male oriented theory for psychology. This reminds us of the limits set by historical circumstances, which impinge on all humans. He was able to break with many of the limiting traditions of his time, particularly to move the concept of development from an exclusive pathological focus to a view that emphasized the positive and productive aspects of growth. He was, however, not successful in breaking with the cultural stereotypes regarding female growth.
Erikson’s nationality is ______.
A. Australian
B. Austrian
C. English
D. American
