40 Fun Facts About Erik Erikson

Which American illustrator, a Stockbridge neighbor, became Erik Erikson's patient and friend?

Norman Rockwell lived in the same small Massachusetts town where Erikson worked at the Austen Riggs Center from 1951 to 1960, treating emotionally troubled young people.

Erik Erikson rose to an Ivy League professorship despite never having earned which of these?

A university degree was something Erikson never earned: after secondary school he spent years roaming Europe, and his later academic posts rested on his clinical reputation and writing.

Erik Erikson grew up as Erik Homburger; where did the surname Erikson come from when he adopted it?

He invented it himself, dropping his stepfather's surname as the family became American citizens. His children were said to be glad they would no longer be teased as "Hamburger".

In Pittsburgh, Erik Erikson worked at a nursery school alongside which future children's TV host?

Fred Rogers and the baby-care author Benjamin Spock both worked with Erikson at the Arsenal Nursery School. Rogers later built Erikson's ideas about young children into his television lessons.

Erik Erikson coined the term "identity crisis" for a struggle he tied to which period of life?

Adolescence is when Erikson believed people must settle who they are and how they fit in. He wrote that his own youthful confusion had sat on the borderline of neurosis.

Which fact about his origins did Erik Erikson never learn, fueling his interest in identity?

Who his father was stayed a mystery: Erikson's mother conceived him outside her marriage, and for years he was told that his stepfather was his real father.

Erik Erikson won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1969 study of militant nonviolence centered on which leader?

Mahatma Gandhi is the subject of Gandhi's Truth, which also won a National Book Award. Erikson built it around a 1918 textile workers' strike that Gandhi led in Ahmedabad.

Which word names Erik Erikson's eight stages of development, running from infancy to old age?

Psychosocial is the label because each stage turns on a conflict between a person's inner needs and the social world around them, a clash Erikson believed continued across the whole lifespan.

Which virtue did Erik Erikson say babies gain by resolving trust versus mistrust, his first stage?

Hope emerges when caregivers reliably provide warmth and comfort, Erikson argued. He added that an infant needs a little mistrust too, to recognize real danger later on.

Erik Erikson defied his stepfather's wishes by choosing to study which subject in Munich?

Art won out over the career his stepfather had planned for him: Erikson enrolled at an art school in Munich, then spent years roaming Germany and Italy trading his sketches.

Which child analyst saw Erik Erikson's gift with pupils at a small school and later analyzed him?

Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's daughter, helped set up the school and taught there. She urged the young tutor to study psychoanalysis, and he went on to specialize in analyzing children himself.

Which virtue did Erik Erikson assign to late life, when people weigh integrity against despair?

Wisdom comes, in Erikson's account, from accepting one's life in full, the defeats along with the victories. Those who cannot may come to feel that life is unfair and fear dying.

Erik Erikson's 1958 Study in Psychoanalysis and History examines which young religious reformer?

Martin Luther became the model for Erikson's idea of the identity crisis in Young Man Luther, one of the first psychobiographies of a famous historical figure.

What did Erik Erikson call the midlife urge to guide the young, the opposite of stagnation?

Generativity entered the vocabulary in 1950 as Erikson's name for looking after those who come next. Having grown old himself, he decided it mattered more in later life than he had first thought.

Erik Erikson tied his second stage, the toddler years, to mastering which everyday milestone?

Toilet training is the classic test of this stage. Erikson urged parents not to punish failures, so that a child gains self-control without losing self-esteem.

In which city did Erik Erikson earn his psychoanalytic diploma in 1933, just before leaving Europe?

Vienna was where Erikson arrived at 25 to tutor at a small school and stayed to train at the Psychoanalytic Institute. He left in the year Hitler took power in Germany.

Which 1950 book by Erik Erikson first set out his eight stages and remains his best-known work?

Childhood and Society was the first of Erikson's books to become popular, and it carried the phrase "identity crisis" to a wide readership.

Erik Erikson said preschoolers discouraged from taking initiative are left with a sense of what?

Guilt, in Erikson's third stage, makes a child feel like a burden to others. He warned that critical answers to a preschooler's endless questions can plant it too.

Erik Erikson left a California professorship in 1950 when professors there were required to sign what?

A loyalty oath was demanded of the university's teachers amid Cold War fears of Soviet influence. Several who refused to sign lost their jobs, and Erikson was among those who left.

Erik Erikson was born in Germany, but his mother's Jewish family came from which Nordic country?

Denmark was home to Erikson's mother, who left Copenhagen for Germany on finding she was pregnant. In 1933 the family tried to settle there but could not regain citizenship.

In Erik Erikson's theory, toddlers doing things for themselves weigh shame and doubt against what?

Autonomy grows when caregivers encourage a toddler's self-sufficient behavior. Erikson warned that demanding too much too soon, or ridiculing early attempts, breeds self-doubt instead.

Erik Erikson was born in which German city, where his mother had fled from abroad while pregnant?

Frankfurt was his birthplace, but Erikson grew up in Karlsruhe, where his mother, by then a trained nurse, settled and remarried three years after his birth.

Erik Erikson paired inferiority with which quality, built by praising schoolchildren's handiwork?

Industry, for Erikson, meant diligence: sticking at a task until it is finished and putting work before pleasure. He saw the elementary school years as critical for self-confidence.

In Erik Erikson's sixth stage, young adults who cannot form intimate bonds risk which outcome?

Isolation is the risk, and Erikson thought fear of rejection often lay behind it. He argued that people need a settled sense of who they are before they can commit to someone else.

Erik Erikson retired in 1970 as a professor of human development at which Ivy League school?

Harvard made Erikson a professor of human development in the 1960s, and he taught there until he retired. He kept writing long afterwards, co-authoring a book on old age in his eighties.

While studying psychoanalysis, Erik Erikson earned a diploma in which method of teaching children?

Montessori classes ran alongside Erikson's psychoanalytic studies. The method's focus on how children develop suited a tutor who was learning to analyze the young.

Who added a ninth stage to Erik Erikson's theory in an extended edition published after his death?

His widow, Joan, wrote the new chapters at 93. She argued that in one's eighties and nineties the earlier conflicts return, with the negative side now leading.

In 1938 Erik Erikson traveled from Yale to study child-rearing on a reservation of which Native people?

The Sioux fieldwork took Erikson to a South Dakota reservation, far from the consulting room. It began his lifelong effort to show how a culture shapes the way its young grow up.

On reaching the United States, Erik Erikson became the first child psychoanalyst in which city?

Boston gave Erikson work at Massachusetts General Hospital and a child guidance center, where he quickly built a singular reputation as a clinician.

Which virtue did Erik Erikson tie to resolving the conflict of identity versus role confusion?

Fidelity, in Erikson's sense, is the ability to commit to other people and to accept them despite their differences. He saw it as the prize of a well-resolved fifth stage.

Erik Erikson was adopted by his stepfather, Theodor Homburger, who practiced which profession?

Pediatrician Theodor Homburger married Erikson's mother when the boy was small and later gave him his surname. Erikson kept Homburger as a middle name for the rest of his life.

Erik Erikson moved to California in 1939 to join a child development study at which institution?

UC Berkeley's Institute of Child Welfare invited Erikson to join its research team, and he opened a private practice in child psychoanalysis in San Francisco at the same time.

Which anthropologist became an important contact as Erik Erikson's interests spread beyond psychoanalysis?

Margaret Mead, famed for her fieldwork in Samoa, got to know Erikson along with fellow anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Ruth Benedict. He said his theory was derived from his social and cultural studies.

Erik Erikson's eldest son, Kai, became a leading American scholar of disasters in which field?

Sociology made Kai Erikson's name: he became an authority on the social consequences of catastrophic events and served as president of the American Sociological Association.

The Erikson Institute, a graduate school named for Erik Erikson, is located in which US city?

Chicago's Erikson Institute was founded in 1966 by four child advocates to train people for the newly created Head Start preschool program.

Erik Erikson's wife, a dancer he met at a dress ball, was born in which country?

Canada was her birthplace: she grew up in Ontario, the daughter of an Anglican priest, and was in Europe researching dance for a doctorate when the two met.

Before training as an analyst, Erik Erikson tutored the children of an heiress to which firm?

Tiffany & Co. was founded by Dorothy Burlingham's grandfather. She had brought her four children to Europe seeking a psychoanalytic cure for one son's skin disorder.

Erik Erikson joined anthropologist Alfred Kroeber on a trip to which people of Northern California?

The Yurok, whose territory lies along the Klamath River, gave Erikson his second study of Native American children. He found their upbringing differed from that of the first tribe he had visited.

Which term did Erik Erikson coin for human groups treating outsiders as a separate, inferior kind?

Pseudospeciation, a word Erikson first used in 1966, describes cultural groups acting as though others had become a different species. At its extreme it leads to dehumanization.

In 1973 Erik Erikson gave a prestigious humanities lecture that is named for which US president?

Thomas Jefferson gives his name to the highest honor the federal government confers for achievement in the humanities. Erikson titled his talk Dimensions of a New Identity.