ABSTRACT
Erik Erikson was born in Germany in 1902. He died in Massachusetts in 1994, having produced a rich body of work that included the widely read Childhood and Society, Young Man Luther, and Gandhi’s Truth.1 He is best known for a theory of identityformation achieved through stages of development from infancy through old age, and is credited with coining the notion of “identity crisis,” and its off-spring, “midlife crisis.” Although the themes of self-knowledge and self-realization are as old as any literature we possess, casting them in terms of a now ubiquitous discourse of “identity,” even of “identity politics,” owes a great deal to the popular and academic discussions of Erikson’s work in the 1950s and 1960s when he achieved something of celebrity status.2 Erikson conceives of the several stages of development as a tenuous equilibrium between opposed forces that remain in dynamic conflict.
