Erik Erikson

13 Pages 3310 Words

experimental school for American students run by Dorothy Burlingham, a friend of Anna Freud (Beoree, 1997). That job helped him get admitted into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. He also taught at a private school while educating himself as a Montesorri teacher. Also in Vienna he got a chance to study and be psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud, Sigmund and Martha Freud’s youngest of six children. Erikson then met his wife Joan M. Serson, a Canadian dance teacher, and they went on to have three children, one of whom became a sociologist himself (Sharkey, 1999).
By the 1930’s, with the Nazi’s coming to power, Erikson moved his family first to Copenhagen, then to Boston. He was then offered a job at Harvard Medical School, and while there he practiced child psychoanalysis privately (Slater, 2002). During this time he mat psychologists Henry Murray, and Kurt Lewin, as well as anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. These people were to have nearly as great an effect on Erikson as Sigmund Freud himself (Beoree, 1997). Later on he also held positions at Yale, The University of California at Berkeley, and the Mennings Foundation. Erikson then returned to California to the center for advanced study in the behavioral sciences at Palo Alto and later the Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco, where he was a clinician and psychiatric consultant. In 1939, Erikson became a U.S. citizen and removed Homburger from his name to put in Erikson, which to this day nobody knows where it came from (Slater, 2002).
In between the years of 1933, when he first came to the United States, and 1945, Erikson studied the child-rearing practices of the Sioux tribe in South Dakota, and the Yurok tribe along the pacific coast (Erikson, 1950). The information that he collected from these studies were what made up his first book, Childhood and Society, published in 1950. Also included were analyses of Maxim Gorkiy, and Adolph Hitler,...