born June 15, 1902, Frankfurt am Main, Ger.
died May 12, 1994, Harwich, Mass., U.S.
German-U.S. psychoanalyst.
Trained in Vienna by Anna Freud , in 1933 he immigrated to the U.S., where he practiced child psychoanalysis in Boston and joined the Harvard Medical School faculty. In 1936 he moved to Yale University, and in 1938 he began his first studies of cultural influences on psychological development, working with Sioux Indian children and later with the Yurok Indians. He later taught at the University of California at Berkeley but left in 1950, in the era of McCarthyism, after refusing to sign a loyalty oath vowing support of the Constitution of the U.S. Personality development, in Erikson's view, takes place through a series of identity crises that must be overcome and internalized in preparation for the next developmental stage; he posited eight such stages. His other concerns included social psychology and the interactions of psychology with history, politics, and culture. His works include Childhood and Society (1950), Young Man Luther (1958), Gandhi's Truth (1969), and Life History and the Historical Moment (1975).