Word: eriksons
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...followers limited his legacy by insisting at least as firmly as he did that only the early years of life are substantially formative. The Freudian disciple who can be credited with broadening the original theory and restoring its vitality is a mild, German-born analyst and teacher named Erik Erikson. His now famous notion that a man's whole lifetime moves through a series of discernible and crucial stages grew largely out of Erikson's own personal development. That development is skillfully and admiringly traced in Erik H. Erikson, The Growth of His Work (Atlantic-Little, Brown...
Crippling Dread. It was the publication of Childhood and Society in 1950, Coles notes, that established Erikson's reputation. In that book, Erikson divided life into eight stages, and discussed the emotional conflict that he feels dominates each major step: from infancy ("Basic Trust v. Mistrust") to adolescence ("Identity v. Role Confusion") to adulthood ("Generativity v. Stagnation") to old age ("Ego Integrity v. Despair"). At each stage the crisis must be resolved if the person is to be unharmed by crippling dread or neurosis. At least from adolescence on, the role of society in general, and even the shaping...
...Freudian thinkers, mostly stranded in the formative childhood stage, Erikson's concept was liberating. With the whole of human life their province, psychoanalysts could look cultural anthropologists or social psychologists in the eye and start sharing observed knowledge. The concept has also convinced a whole younger generation of social activists-including Author Coles -that children more than five years old are not irrevocably molded and that those who are poor in their early years can later make up for their deprived background...
...popular mind, Erikson is perhaps best known for the catch phrase "identity crisis," used to describe the struggle the individual may face during adolescence. As he observed later: "If ever an identity crisis was central and long-drawn-out in somebody's life, it was so in mine." His Danish parents were separated when he was born in 1902, and he grew up in Karlsruhe, Germany, with his mother and stepfather, a Jewish pediatrician. He had little interest in school and at 18 began several years of wandering about in the Black Forest and northern Italy as "a transitional...
Idyllic Atmosphere. Erikson accepted and stayed on, gradually putting aside his notion of the artist's life as he became more deeply involved in the almost idyllic atmosphere that surrounded the master. Analysis was shorter then and less formal; social relations between doctor and patient were not yet suspect. Erikson taught the children, was analyzed by Anna Freud and gradually became a practicing child analyst himself. He has no university degree...