ABSTRACT
Erik Erikson’s first teaching post in America was at Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he spent many years cultivating the view that personality could develop from an interaction of the self and society. After a spell at Yale University, he was offered a position at the University of California, and it was during this time that he carried out his famous studies of modern life among native Americans, such as the Sioux and the Yurok. In 1950 Erikson wrote his first book Childhood and Society, which contained summaries of his studies of native Americans, a basic outline of his version of Freudian theory, along with analyses of Adolf Hitler, Maxim Gorky, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi. Erikson never actually met these four historical figures, but analysed each of them from afar. He also included a discussion of the ‘American personality’. Books he has written since have followed similar topics, but it was for his work refining and expanding Freud’s stage theory of development into his own whole life theory, that he became most famous. In writing this theory Erikson drew on his past experiences and observations, but his ideas on adolescence came mainly from his observations of emotionally disturbed young people receiving therapy.
