Erik Homburger Erikson was born in Germany in 1902 to Danish parents. He studied child analysis at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute with Anna Freud, then emigrated to the United States in 1933. There, he developed affiliations with Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of California at Berkeley, establishing Child Guidance Clinics for the treatment of childhood psychological disturbances. Erikson and his wife Joan introduced the theory of the eight stages of the human life cycle at a White House Conference in 1950, the same year Childhood and Society was published. Erickson wrote Identity: Youth and Crisis in 1968, a time of great upheaval among American youth. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1994.

While Freud emphasized internal psychosexual conflict in personality development, Erikson recognized that the social environment plays a significant role in shaping a child’s sense of self. Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development is based on the premise that humans interact with an ever-widening circle of people, beginning with mother and ending with humankind in general.

Each of the eight stages of the human lifecycle is marked by a normative developmental crisis that is resolved on a continuum between opposing positive and negative outcomes (Table 2-1). Personality is formed as a result of the resolution of these crises, leaving people with both strengths and weaknesses. The mature personality represents the integration of earlier stages of development, their crises, and resolutions, into later stages.

Unlike Freud, who was pessimistic about humans’ ability to overcome an unfortunate early childhood, Erikson believed that humans rework earlier crises later in life. Their beliefs about the role of early experience are an important difference between Freud and Erikson, with Erikson being more hopeful than Freud. Reworking can be growth enhancing when the overall balance of the personality is more positive than negative. If earlier crises were poorly resolved, however, revisiting them can be disruptive, especially when doing so coincides with accidental life crises, such as illness or death.