Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,767

This is the grave of Erik Erikson.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1902, Erik Salomonsen grew up the result of an affair between his Jewish mom and a Danish guy. She was married, it ended an already bad marriage and the biological father was nowhere to be found. She remarried a pediatrician named Theodor Homburger, another Jewish man, in 1905 and her son became Erik Homburger. They told him that Theodor was his real father and when he found out this was not true, in his late teen years, he became extremely bitter. Like most of these early psychologists, he had some serious personal issues. His stepfather wanted him to attend medical school, but instead he attended art school. But really struggling with being a tall, Nordic looking Jew, he struggled with his identity a lot, never really fitting in. So he dropped out of school and roamed around Germany for awhile.

While on his roaming, he had to support himself, so he became a tutor for some rich people’s kids. Well, they knew Sigmund and Anna Freud and that whole circle of people took to the kid and hired him for other tutoring jobs. Anna, Sigmund’s daughter, was doing a lot of psychoanalysis of her own and he got a job at a school where she was treating many of the parents. It was an era where people liked to believe they had personal problems when in fact they were just like everyone else, but people in the 20th century sure liked to talk about themselves. Well, anyway, all this led Homburger, as he was still known at this time, to study psychoanalysis himself at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. He became a top student there, specializing in children. He received his degree in 1933.

While in Vienna as well, Homburger married a Christian woman and converted. But then came the Nazis. He realized the danger very fast and got out. Harvard Medical School offered him a job. Not only did he take it, but shortly after he entered the United States, he changed his name to Erik Erikson. For a guy who focused his entire career on questions of identity and the ego, this was the most on the nose move one could ever possibly make. But hey, at least he was honest about it all and lived his own ideas. Totally respect that, unless the type of famous academic whose work has nothing to do with the way they carry themselves (thinking at this moment about this guy I used to know whose PhD adviser was a Marxist philosopher at the University of Colorado who was also a slumlord in the same city; hell, for that matter W.E.B. DuBois was a slumlord in Black neighborhoods of south Florida).

Erikson became the first child psychoanalyst in Boston, working at Harvard and Mass General. In 1936, he moved on to Yale. A man with a deeply restless intellect, he moved toward anthropology as his career went on and worked with people such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. He went to South Dakota in 1938 to study the “Sioux,” which is a term no one really uses anymore, so I am not sure if that was the Yankton or the Oglala or Dakota or Teton of which exactly, as well as going to California and doing studies with the Yurok. His interest remained on children and how childhood identity developed and so one can see why anthropology would be so useful to this psychologist since different peoples have different experiences of childhood.

Erikson eventually ended up at the University of California, but as a confirmed leftist, he left in 1950 when the Levering Act required professors in the state to sign a loyalty oath, which he flat out would not do (I wonder how many professors will sign whatever the Trump administration pushes like this). He went to the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts in 1951 to work with troubled young people and stayed there until 1960. He moved around a lot in his career generally, visiting at the University of Pittsburgh (working with both Benjamin Spock and Fred Rogers [!!!!!!] at the Western Psychiatric Institute there. Finally, he ended up back at Harvard and retired in 1970.

This brief overview of a career really does kind of miss the point, but I confess that my interest in psychoanalysis is limited to scenes in Woody Allen movies. So I will try to summarize some of the major ideas, but please, the many of you who know much more about this than I do, go for it in comments. After all, the point of this series is not just to memorialize, say, jazz musicians that I can talk about, but Americans from a variety of backgrounds and fields, even if they are beyond my experiences and knowledge.

Erikson strongly believed that the environment around a child influenced their personality deeply, which, duh, but at the time was not so widely accepted, I guess. He came up with his eight stages of psychological development. The first was hope and trust, developed in infancy. Then was will, framed by autonomy and shame, which was the toddler phase, up to the age of 3. Being a twentieth century psychoanalyst, much of this was about toilet training. These people sure loved analyzing things like this. The third was called purpose, which was framed as initiative vs. guilt, which was ages 3-5, which is where you start to see interactions between kids and those frame life, which I can buy. Then came competence, or industry versus inferiority, which covered ages up to 11, when kids are awfully sensitive. He urged teachers to take this very seriously and help kids feel good about themselves. Fifth, is fidelity, or identity vs. role confusion, which is up to age 18 and when kids figure out who they are going to be and what kind of decisions that will require, which according to Erikson is why teens try out so many role identities. Sixth is adulthood up to age 40, which he defined as love, or intimacy vs. isolation. This is when people start thinking about others and how the failure to mate can lead to deep depression and isolation. Seventh is the years between 40 and 65, defined as care, or generativity vs. stagnation. This is when people supposedly try to pass their values onto the next generation, if they are healthy. I don’t have kids but I do teach and I very much do try to teach values within the context of American history (note: we have bad values as a nation), so maybe I am a healthy person lol. Finally, the post-65 period is wisdom, or ego vs. despair. Do we age gracefully with satisfaction about our lives or are we filled with regret.

Well, that’s about as good as I can do here. I do want to mention that his wife Joan was at his side the whole time. They married in 1930 and she was a talented person too, who pretty much dedicated her life to being her husband’s assistant. She also developed her own ideas of art therapy, thought and wrote a lot about play as well. They both wrote a ton of books, occasionally together. I do wonder about his book on Martin Luther. Talk about a guy who needed some psychoanalysis…..

Anyway, this post is too long as is, so have at it in comments.

Erikson died in 1994. He was 91 years old. Joan outlived him and made it to 1997, dying at the age of 94.

Erik Erikson is buried in First Congregational Church Cemetery, Harwich, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to butcher the career of other psychologists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Abraham Maslow is in Cambridge (Mount Auburn, the cemetery that keeps on giving me experts in fields I barely understand) and John B. Watson is in Westport, Connecticut. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.