Erik Homberger Erikson

Erikson was with the University of California, Berkeley for a decade. He conducted a cross-cultural study of Yurok Indians of northern California with the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. When World War II started, he contributed to the war effort with his articles on submarine habitation and the interrogation of the prisoners of war. He also wrote the first psychobiographical essays on Adolph Hitler and the psychosocial dynamics of his appeal to young Germans. His Hitler's Imagery and German Youth was published in 1942.

Erikson was offered professorship at the University of California, but he had to quit before the year was up. The activities of Senator Joe McCarthy and the Committee on Un-American Activities became a dangerous force to reckon with in the University campuses. Professors were being forced to sign loyalty oaths to establish their anticommunist credentials. Erikson refused to do so and he was fired for being one of the few non-signers. Later, he was reinstated as politically dependable, but he resigned because others who had been fired for the same reason were not taken back.

That very year Robert Knight left the Menninger Clinic to become the director of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He had known Erikson at the Menninger Clinic, and he offered him a position at the Austen Riggs Center, which was devoted to the psychoanalytic treatment and research of severely disturbed adolescents and young adults. Erikson resigned his professorship with Berkeley in 1950 and accepted the offer. Erikson spent the next decade at the Austen Riggs Center working with young patients. This work helped him crystallize the ideas of identity formation and identity confusion.

The year 1950 also saw the publication of his magnum opus Childhood and Society. Now Erikson's fame was no longer confined within the four walls of the academia. His perceptive observations and radical ideas on human psychological development and the eight-stage life cycle model enthralled every person who was interested in man as a subject. He was also chosen to contribute to the Mid-century White House Conference.

Erikson brought out his major works in the last four decades of his life. He ventured into psychoanalytic biography on a much grander scale with his psychohistory classics Young Man Luther and Gandhi's Truth. His other major works include Identity and the Life Cycle, Insight and Responsibility, Identity: Youth and Crisis, Dimensions of a New Identity, Life History and the Historical Moment, The Life Cycle Completed: A Review, and Vital Involvement in Old Age with co-authors Joan Erikson and Helen Q. Kivnick. All his books deal with the human life cycle as expounded by him and the problems of identity lurking therein, and how public events and private acts are inextricably linked.

In 1959, he joined the Center for Advanced Studies of the Behavioural Sciences, Palo Alto, California. He was appointed as Professor of Human Development at Harvard University the next year. He taught a very popular course on the human life cycle. He stayed here until his retirement in1970.