19 Facts About Erik Erikson

On discovering her pregnancy, Karla fled to Frankfurt am Main in Germany where Erik Erikson was born on 15 June 1902 and was given the surname Salomonsen.

Erik Erikson fled due to conceiving Erik out of wedlock, and the identity of Erik's birth father was never made clear.

Erik Erikson was a tall, blond, blue-eyed boy who was raised in the Jewish religion.

Uncertain about his vocation and his fit in society, Erik Erikson dropped out of school and began a lengthy period of roaming about Germany and Italy as a wandering artist with his childhood friend Peter Blos and others.

Erik Erikson worked very well with these children and was eventually hired by many other families that were close to Anna and Sigmund Freud.

When Erikson was twenty-five, his friend Peter Blos invited him to Vienna to tutor art at the small Burlingham-Rosenfeld School for children whose affluent parents were undergoing psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna Freud.

Erik Erikson specialized in child analysis and underwent a training analysis with Anna Freud.

In 1930 Erikson married Joan Mowat Serson, a Canadian dancer and artist whom Erikson had met at a dress ball.

In 1936, Erikson left Harvard and joined the staff at Yale University, where he worked at the Institute of Social Relations and taught at the medical school.

Erik Erikson made important contacts with anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Benedict.

In 1939 he left Yale, and the Eriksons moved to California, where Erik had been invited to join a team engaged in a longitudinal study of child development for the University of California at Berkeley's Institute of Child Welfare.

In 1950, after publishing the book, Childhood and Society, for which he is best known, Erikson left the University of California when California's Levering Act required professors there to sign loyalty oaths.

Erik Erikson returned to Harvard in the 1960s as a professor of human development and remained there until his retirement in 1970.

On ego identity versus role confusion: ego identity enables each person to have a sense of individuality, or as Erikson would say, "Ego identity, then, in its subjective aspect, is the awareness of the fact that there is a self-sameness and continuity to the ego's synthesizing methods and a continuity of one's meaning for others".

Erik Erikson gave such a strong contribution that his work was well received by students of religion and spurred various secondary literature.

Individuals like Luther or Gandhi were what Erikson called a Homo Religiosus, individuals for whom the final life cycle challenge of integrity vs despair is a lifelong crisis, and they become gifted innovators whose own psychological cure becomes an ideological breakthrough for their time.

Erik Erikson's eldest son, Kai T Erikson, is an American sociologist.

Erik Erikson thought that by combining resources with his wife, he could "achieve the recognition" that might produce a feeling of adequacy.

Erik Erikson is buried in the First Congregational Church Cemetery in Harwich.