Erik erikson

Erik Homburger Erikson (Frankfurt am Main, Germany, June 15, 1902-Harwich, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, United States, May 12, 1994), registered at birth as Erik Salomonsen, was a German-American psychologist and psychoanalyst of Jewish origin recognized worldwide, among other areas, for his contributions to developmental psychology.

His theories about the identity crisis of adolescence —and its corresponding impact on the personality of the individual—, as well as his proposal that the main neurosis that affected the United States after the world war was narcissism, they became very popular in the 1950s and 1960s. A survey, published in the Review of General Psychology in 2002, ranked Erikson as the twelfth most eminent psychologist of the century XX.

Biography

Its origin is shrouded in a certain mystery. His biological father was an unknown Dane who left his wife just after Erik was born. Her mother, Karla Abrahamsen, a young Danish woman of Jewish origin, raised her son alone for the first three years of her life. She then married Dr. Theodor Homberger, who was the boy's pediatrician, and together they moved to Karlsruhe, southern Germany.

After finishing high school, Erik decided to be an artist. When he wasn't attending art classes, he wandered around Europe, visiting museums and sleeping under bridges. He lived a careless rebel life for a long time, just before seriously considering what to do with his life.

When he was 25, a friend of his, Peter Blos (artist and later psychoanalyst), suggested that he apply for a teaching position at an experimental school for American students run by Dorothy Burlingham, a friend of Anna Freud. In addition to teaching art, he earned a certificate in Montessori education and another from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He was psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud herself. While there, he met a theater dance teacher at the aforementioned school. They had three children, one of whom would later become a sociologist.

When the Nazis seized power, they left Vienna and went first to Copenhagen and then to Boston. Erikson accepted a position at Harvard Medical School and performed psychoanalysis on children in his private practice. At that time he managed to rub shoulders with psychologists such as Henry Murray and Kurt Lewin, as well as anthropologists Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. These authors exerted great influence on the work of Erikson.

He later taught at Yale and then at the University of California at Berkeley. It was during this period that Erik Erikson conducted his studies on the Lakota and Yurok Native American tribes. When he obtained his US citizenship, he officially adopted the name Erik Erikson.

In 1950 he wrote Childhood and Society, a book that contained articles on his studies of North American tribes, analysis of Maxim Gorky and Adolf Hitler, as well as as a discussion of the "American personality" and the argumentative bases of his version of Freudian theory. These themes (the influence of culture on personality and the analysis of historical figures) were repeated in other works, one of which, Gandhi's Truth, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book.

During Senator Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror in 1950, Erikson leaves Berkeley when faculty are asked to sign a "loyalty pledge." From this point on, Erikson spends 10 years working and teaching in a Massachusetts clinic and then another 10 years back at Harvard. After his retirement in 1970, he did not stop writing and researching for the rest of his life. He dies in 1994.

Works

Major Publications

• Childhood and Society (1950)
• Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958)
• Insight and Responsibility (1966)
• Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968)
• Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969)
• Life History and the Historical Moment (1975)
• Toys and Reasons: Stages in the Ritualization of Experience (1977)
• Adulthood (edited book, 1978)
• Vital Involvement in Old Age (with J. M. Erikson and H. Kivnick, 1986)
• The Life Cycle Completed (with J. M. Erikson, 1987)

Collections

• Identity and the Life Cycle. Selected Papers (1959)
• "A Way of Looking at Things – Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980, Erik H. Erikson" ed. by S. Schlein, W. W. Norton & Co, New York, (1995)

Aspects of his work

Heterodoxy

A disciple of Freud, he disagreed with him, however, in two basic aspects:

1. That people are active beings, seeking to adapt to their environment, rather than passive slaves of impulses.
2. To give greater importance than Freud to cultural influences.

Psychosocial Theory

He developed a theory of personality development which he called psychosocial theory. In it he describes eight stages of the life cycle or psychosocial stages (crises or conflicts in the development of life, which people have to face):

1. Basic trust vs. mistrust (from birth to about 18 months). It's the physical feeling of trust. The baby gets the warmth of the mother's body and her loving care. It develops the link that will be the basis of its future relationships with other important people; it is receptive to environmental stimuli and therefore sensitive and vulnerable to frustration experiences that are the earliest experiences that provide acceptance, security and emotional satisfaction and are at the basis of the development of individuality. It depends then on the feeling of trust that parents have in themselves and on others who can reflect it on their children.
2. Autonomy vs. shame and doubt (from 18 months to about 3 years). This stage is linked to muscle development and control of body removals. This development is slow and progressive and is not always consistent and stable; therefore the baby passes through moments of shame and doubt. The baby begins to control a growing sense of affirmation of the will of an emerging self; it is often affirmed by opposing others. The child begins to experience his or her own self-will by experiencing impulsive forces that are established in various forms in the conduct of the child and are oscillating between cooperation and stubbornness; the attitudes of the parents and their own feeling of autonomy are fundamental in the development of the child ' s autonomy. This establishes its first emancipation in such a way that in later stages it will repeat this emancipation in many ways.
3. Initiative vs. guilt (from 3 to 5 years). The third stage of the Initiative is given at the age of the game. The child develops activity and imagination and is more energetic and loquacious, learns to move more freely and violently, his knowledge of language is perfected, understands better and asks questions constantly; all this allows him to expand his imagination and acquire a feeling of initiative that constitutes the realistic basis of a sense of ambition and purpose. There is a crisis that is solved with an increase in his feeling of being himself. It is more active and is provided with a certain surplus of energy, identify what can be done with action; discover what you can do along with what you are capable of doing. These are characteristics of this stage:
   1. Intrusion into space through vigorous locomotive.
   2. Intrusion into the unknown through a great curiosity.
   3. Intrusion in the perceptual field of others.
   4. Sexual fantasies (the games at this age have special symbolic connotations on sexual aspects). With regard to the latter, the child has a rudimentary genitality and often has feelings of guilt and fears associated with it.
4. Labour vs. inferiority (from 5 to about 13 years). It is the stage in which the child begins preschool and schooling; the child is anxious to do things together with others, to share tasks, to do things or to plan them, and no longer forces the other children or causes their restriction. It has a childish way to master social experience by experiencing, planning, sharing. He becomes dissatisfied and dissatisfied with the feeling of not being able to do things and not doing them well and yet perfect; the feeling of inferiority can make him feel inferior psychologically, either because of his economic-social situation or because of his "racial" condition or because of a poor school stimulation because it is precisely the school institution that must ensure the establishment of the feeling of laboriousness.
5. Identity search vs. identity dissemination (from 13 to about 21 years). Both identity-seeking and identity-crisis are experienced that will revive the conflicts of each of the previous stages. The parents of adolescents face new situations that mean a new challenge to their oriented mission. These are identity characteristics of the adolescent
   • The temporal perspective, orientation in time and space.
   • Security itself.
   • Experimentation with role, emphasis on action.
   • Learning, interest in contact with the environment and a life learning strategy.
   • Sexual polarization: appropriate degree of development of the sexual interest itself.
   • Leadership and Accession: Appropriate integration into the "couple" group.
   • Ideological commitment, value guidance and participation in the environment.
6. Intimacy against isolation (from 21 to about 40 years). Intimacy supposes the possibility of being close to others as the subject has a feeling of knowing who he is, he is not afraid of “losing” himself; unlike many teenagers, the young adult no longer has to prove himself. But to this it is added that our society has not done much for young adults either; the maladaptative tendency, which Erikson calls "promiscuity", refers particularly to becoming too open, very easily, without effort and without any depth or respect for intimacy. This trend can be given both with lovers and friends, colleagues and neighbors.
7. Generation against stagnation (from 40 to about 60 years). Journal generally dedicated to the upbringing of children. The fundamental task of this stage is to achieve an appropriate balance between productivity and stagnation. Productivity is an extension of love for the future; it has to do with concern about the next generation and all other futures. Both having and raising children as well as doing tasks related to teaching, writing, inventiveness, sciences, arts and social activism complement the task of productivity; ultimately, anything that fills that “old need to be needed.” The stagnation, on the other hand, is the “self-absorption”: taking care of anyone; people try to be so productive that there comes a time when they cannot afford any time for themselves, to relax and rest. In the end, these people can't contribute anything to society either. This is the stage of the “middle-age crisis” asks “what am I doing here?”.
8. Integrity in the face of despair (from about 60 years to death). This is the last stage. In the delicate late adulthood, or maturity, the primary task is to achieve integrity with a minimum of despair. A social distance occurs first. From a feeling of inutility there is a sense of biological inutility because the body no longer responds as before; along with illnesses there are concerns about death. Friends die, relatives too, and this contributes to the emergence of a feeling of hopelessness. In response to this despair, some older people start to worry about the past. Yoic integrity means reaching the terms of life and therefore reaching the terms of the end of your life. The misadaptive tendency is called presumption; when the person “presumes” a yoic integrity without actually facing the difficulties of senectud.