Erik Homburger Erikson was a German-born American psychoanalyst and educator whose studies have perhaps contributed most to the understanding of the young. His widowed mother subsequently married the pediatrician Theodore Homburger. Erikson first studied painting in Germany and Italy. This led to his training analysis by Anna Freud and immersion in theoretical seminars and in clinical work. Having also acquired a Montessori diploma, he graduated from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in In , he had married Canadian-born Joan Mowat Serson, who was vitally interested in education, as well as the arts and crafts, and deeply shared his interest in writing.
Erik Homburger Erikson born Erik Salomonsen ; 15 June — 12 May was a German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychological development of human beings. He may be most famous for coining the phrase identity crisis. His son, Kai T. Erikson , is a noted American sociologist. Despite lacking a bachelor's degree, Erikson served as a professor at prominent institutions, including Harvard , University of California UC Berkeley , [8] and Yale. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in , ranked Erikson as the 12th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. She was married to Jewish stockbroker Valdemar Isidor Salomonsen, but had been estranged from him for several months at the time Erik was conceived.
As a young man, Erikson attended art school and traveled around Europe. In , when he was invited by the psychoanalyst Anna Freud to teach art, history, and geography at a small private school in Vienna, he entered psychoanalysis with her and underwent training to become a psychoanalyst himself. He became interested in the treatment of children and published his first paper in , before completing psychoanalytic training and being elected to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in The same year, he emigrated to the United States , where he practiced child psychoanalysis in Boston and joined the faculty of the Harvard Medical School.
This is a beta version of NNDB. Although his best-known work is the now classic Childhood and Society , additional facets of his theory were elaborated in such works as Identity: Youth and Crisis and Young Man Luther Gandhi's Truth , which focused more on his theory as applied to later phases in the life cycle, garnered Erikson the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.