Erik
Erikson (1902 - 1994)
Born in Germany,
Erik Erikson had no university education there and went to art school in Italy.
During the 1920s, he got to know the Freud family and was accepted as a co-worker at the Vienna Psychoanalytical
Institute. In 1934, he moved to Boston and became the first child analyst in
New England. During his long career, which included appointments at the
universities of Yale and Harvard, his primary concern was the interaction of
social norms and biological drives in generating self and identity (Erikson,
1950a).
His original
training as a teacher freed him from the 19th-century heritage of neurological
psychiatry that bedeviled the
psychoanalysts of the first post-Freudian generation. His well-known
description of eight developmental stages covering the lifespan (Erikson,
1950b) was based on biological events
that disturb the equilibrium between drives and social adjustment. Personality
would be arrested if the developmental
challenge was not mastered through the
evolution of new skills and attitudes. This
would compromise later developmental stages. Erikson was remarkable amongst
psychoanalysts for his attention to cultural and family factors, and his
extension of the developmental model to the entire lifecycle. His theory introduced plasticity to the psychoanalytical
developmental model, as well as stressing the need for a coherent self-concept
fulfilled in a supportive social milieu.
The drive
expression model binds understanding of social interaction to the gratification
of biological needs. Erikson showed us how a person might find that a means of gratification, originally associated
with a particular phase or erogenous zone, offers a useful way of expressing
later wishes and conflicts. This enabled
him to introduce a whole series of constructs, including identity, generatively,
and basic trust. He expanded the drive model while remaining in a biological
framework. His description of libido theory as tragedies and comedies taking
place around the orifices of the body aptly
summarizes Erikson's widening perspective enriched by anthropology and
developmental study.
For Erikson,
basic trust was the mode of functioning of the oral stage. He stressed that
these processes established interpersonal patterns that were centered on the social modality of taking, and holding onto,
objects, physical and psychic. Erikson
(1950a) defined basic trust as a capacity to give and to receive and accept
what is given. (p.
58).
By emphasizing
the interactional psychosocial aspects of development, Erikson quietly altered
the central position assigned to excitement in Freud's theory of psychosexual
development. Although he accepted the libidinal phase model and its timings as
givens, his formulation was one of the first to shift the emphasis from a
mechanistic drive theory view to the inherently interpersonal and transactional
nature of the child-caregiver dyad as these are currently understood, related
to the child's development of a sense of self.
Erikson's (1950a) brilliant insight, far ahead of his time, was that
seemingly insignificant experiences would eventually become aggregated, and
firmly create the establishment of enduring patterns for the balance of basic
trust over basic mistrust.
[the] amount of trust derived from
earliest infantile experience does not seem to depend on absolute quantities of
food or demonstrations of love, but rather on the quality of the maternal
relationships (Erikson, 1959, p. 63).
While many of his ideas have been so generally
adopted that they are rare
nowadays linked with his name (e.g., the crisis of identity in adolescence),
his imperative to make psychodynamic theory socially relevant is as pertinent
now as it was at the time of its publication.
PETER FONAGY
 © Cambridge
University Press 2005
Cambridge Encyclopaedia
of Child Development
Cambridge
University Press
http://www.credoreference.com/entry/cupchilddev/erik_erikson_1902_1994
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