Erik Erikson

Erik Homburger Erikson (* June 15, 1902 in Frankfurt am Main, † 12 May 1994, Harwich, Massachusetts, USA ) was a German - American psychoanalyst and representatives of the psychoanalytic ego psychology. He is regarded as Neofreudianer. He became known especially through the he developed stage model of psychosocial development.

Life

Erikson was born to Danish -born parents, but separated before his birth. The first three years the child grew up in Frankfurt am Main with his mother, Karla Abrahamsen. 1905 married his mother and the Jewish pediatrician Theodor Homburger, who had treated the child. The family moved to Karlsruhe.

After visiting the Bismarck -Gymnasium Karlsruhe Erikson studied at an art academy. This was followed by years of travel as an artist. He then worked as a private tutor of an American family in Vienna. About this family of contact with the psychoanalytic movement was born. Erikson, Anna Freud learned to know and came with her training analysis in contact. Emerged more contacts to Sigmund Freud, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris and Helene German. Thus his interest in psychoanalysis was awakened: he gave up painting, underwent a training analysis and trained as a psychoanalyst. In Vienna, Erik Erikson met his future wife, the Canadian educator and sociologist Joan Serson know.

After the Nazis gained power in Germany in 1933, Erikson emigrated from Vienna to Copenhagen in the United States of America and in 1939 was a U.S. citizen. He settled in Boston, and opened the first practice of child analysis in the city. In 1938 he lived for a time with the Sioux Indians, and analyzed their coexistence. Later, he also traveled to the north coast of California, to study the Indian fishermen tribe of Yurok. He was in the U.S. - to have completed a university degree without ever - Professor of Developmental Psychology at the American elite universities Berkeley and Harvard. Here he developed and published his famous stage model of psychosocial development, an evolution of the Freudian model of psychosexual development, which divided the evolution of man from birth to death in eight phases. In each of these phases of the development model, there is a developmental crisis, whose solution paves the further development path. The key concept Erikson to understanding the human psyche is the identity, or the self-identity, as opposed to ego development, the stagnant usually in young adulthood. In addition to the children's development and psychology Erikson also dealt with ethnology. Here he coined in 1968 the fertile concept of Pseudospeciation: primitive man made ​​strains that another usually as separate species behaved ( Pseudomonas species ) and competed with each other to. He wrote psychoanalytically oriented biographies of Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi, among others, in connection with the substantiated by the concept of generativity. For the biography of Mahatma Gandhi ( Gandhi 's Truth, 1969), he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize.

Works (selection)

  • Insight and responsibility; Frankfurt q.s. (1964) 1971
  • Identity and life cycle. Three essays; Frankfurt q.s. 1966; 2nd edition 1973
  • The young man Luther. A psychoanalytic and historical study. In 1975.
  • Gandhi's truth. About the origins of militant nonviolence, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1978; 3rd edition Frankfurt 1984, ISBN 3-518-27865-7
  • Youth and crisis; Stuttgart 1970
  • The full life cycle; Frankfurt q.s. 1988; 2nd edition 1992
  • Childhood and Society; New York 1950; Childhood and Society; Zurich 1957
May 12 Yurok people Loevinger's stages of ego development Paul Roazen Name Authority File
311900
de