Erik Homberger Erikson

Erik Homberger Erikson was born on June 15, 1902, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. His parents were both Danish. His father was Protestant and mother Jewish. They had separated before his birth, and he was born when his mother was visiting friends in Germany.

Erikson's mother, Karla Abrahamsen, stayed with her son in Karlsruhe, an old capital of a Lutheran principality in Germany. When he was three years old, she married the child's pediatrician, Dr. Theodor Homberger, a Jew. Erikson's parents were very loving; his mother was bookish and artistic but sad, his stepfather kind and professionally respected. He did not know as a child that Dr. Homberger was not his real father. This adoption by his stepfather was crucial in setting a lifelong pattern in Erikson's life. All along in his life, he got himself adopted by some kind man or the other.

Erikson attended the Humanistiche Gymnasium in Karlsruhe. He studied Greek, Latin, philosophy, literature and science. During this period, he had an alienated adolescence. His German classmates teased him for being a Jew, and his Jewish peers rejected him as a gentile because of his Nordic physical features.

Erikson completed his schooling at the age of 18. He was not at all interested in formal study and decided not to join any university. His primary interest was art, and he spent time travelling about the German countryside reading, drawing, and making woodcarvings. He returned home after a year and tried formal art study, first in Karlsruhe and then in Munich. At 21, Erikson went to Florence and continued to study art informally. Here he struck friendship with his old schoolmate Peter Blos, who later became famous as a writer and child psychoanalyst.

In 1927, when Erikson was 25, Peter Blos invited him over to Vienna to become an art teacher at a psychoanalytically enlightened school for children started by Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud. Here, he also got to meet Sigmund Freud. Blos had to work hard to turn him into a disciplined worker. As Erikson later recalled "To make a teacher of me::the highly disciplined Peter first had to teach me to keep regular hours, a task which was initiated every morning, no matter what time of the year, by a cold shower, then the preferred treatment for identity confusion". He also obtained a certificate from the Maria Montessori School as one of the few men with a membership in the Montessori Lehrerinnen Verein. This marked the end of his aimless adolescence.

Erikson had doubts about himself, and he once told Anna Freud that he could not see a place for his artistic inclinations there in the high intellectual endeavors. Anna Freud quietly said, "You might help to make them see". Erikson now turned his roving artist's eye from the observation of nature to the psychoanalytic observation of children's play. This convergence of the artistic and the theoretical is seen in all his work. In his first articles, he applied psychoanalytic thinking to educational themes.