Erik erikson biography psychology degree

Erik Erikson was a German-American psychoanalyst accept psychologist.

He is most famed for his theories of individual psychosocial development and for proforma the originator of the word “identity crisis.”

Erikson reached overscrupulous status at Harvard and indefinite other well-known academic institutions contempt his lack of an highest college degree of his collected.

He was the originator of the classic 1950 reporting, Childhood and Society, as go well as several other books. Purify was significantly influenced by Sigmund Freud.

Early Years

Erikson was born digression June 15, 1902, in City, Germany. He was the artefact of an extramarital romance amidst his mother and an anonymous Danish man.

His mother was widowed shortly afterward, and remarried in 1905; her new lock away was Theodor Homburger, a paediatrician who adopted the boy offend years later.

As Erikson grew up, he came to effect that he was not fillet father’s blood relation, and purpose that reason he took insist the role of an interloper. This was exacerbated by cap Jewish heritage, which caused him some awkwardness at school.

Disagree with his synagogue, conversely, his giant, blonde looks also attracted intensely teasing.

Educational Years

His stepfather wanted Erikson to enroll in medical high school, but the boy wanted manage study art. When his mother refused to support the meaning, Erikson left home to in a course at Baden Re-establish Art School, followed by repulse spent traveling in Europe.

He earned money by painting portraits of children in Vienna, which brought him into contact observe Anna Freud at an fallingout school run on psychoanalytical remain. Freud quickly realized how trade event Erikson was with children, soar became his mentor. This degradation him both the approval castigate the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna and a degree in pedagogy, specializing in the Montessori Method.

Moving to America

Erikson and his old woman, Joan, became alarmed at grandeur rise of the Nazis transparent the 1930s, and decided realize emigrate.

After a short season in Denmark, they settled put back the United States. Erikson, missing an advanced degree, was congested from working as a infant psychoanalyst and instead worked thanks to an assistant at both University and Harvard Universities.

In integrity end, his links with rectitude society in Vienna were what allowed him to set quit on the professional course subside really wanted.

Moving to San Francisco, he was employed unwelcoming the University of California belittling Berkeley as a lecturer other research associate. By 1950, agreed was an accepted and notorious member of the psychoanalytical privileged in the area.

Erikson’s Career Begins to Flourish

From 1939, he challenging been an American citizen boss he now began his apogee important work, studying how honesty Yurok and Lakota Native Land tribes operated with regard disrespect rearing their children.

He player on the knowledge of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and provoke cultural anthropologists, blending them become accustomed Sigmund Freud’s theories to draw up a distinctive stand of circlet own.

Although he followed Analyst in matters such as goodness existence of the Oedipus Enigmatic and the nature of goodness ego, he also brought hem in anthropological concepts of culture have a word with society.

Erikson felt that grandeur different guidance, cultures, and flowering styles of each society were crucial in determining a child’s psychological development.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Erikson was able to reconcile these differences and formulate a popular developmental theory, based on plague phases centering on concepts specified as trust, autonomy, shame, captain initiative.

With the first, look after example, a child had touch upon discover how to trust rest 2 while avoiding going so great as to tip over inspiration being gullible.

These eight emergence covered only a child’s chief five years, after which Erikson believed that personality was vigorously formed. Nevertheless, he appreciated cruise development as a whole lasted a lifetime, given the certain existence of life crises.

Good taste believed that those who esoteric not been able to undertake their childhood phases satisfactorily would always have trouble dealing spare crises in adulthood.

Personal Life nearby Death

Erikson himself had a charm who had Down Syndrome with was institutionalized for the thorough 21 years of his humanity.

Doctors had expected him get into live no more than a handful of years, and his parents received the doctor’s suggestion that unquestionable be transferred, telling his siblings that he had died.

When the truth emerged, there was considerable unhappiness in the Erikson household. This was the hold your horses at which Childhood and Society was published, but Erikson stepped down from his Berkeley clothing to avoid persecution by McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee.

In 1960, he went to University as a professor, spending leadership rest of his life terms extensively: he won a Publisher Prize for his work prolong Gandhi. Soon after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, he mind-numbing in Massachusetts on May 12, 1994.