World-renowned psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, an expert on human development who coined the phrase "identity crisis," died Thursday at the age of 91.
Harvard Professor Diana Eck, a longtime friend of Erikson, told Reuters he died Thursday morning at the Rosewood Manor Nursing Home in Harwich, Mass. The cause of death was not known.Born in Germany in 1902, Erikson graduated from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1933 and immigrated to the United States the same year.
He extended Freudian theory into adolescence and adulthood,
stressing social relationships over sexual needs as the key to growing up. He was the author of many books, including such works as "Identity: Youth and Crisis," "Identity and the Life Cycle" and "Childhood and Society," the first major exposition of his views on psychosocial development.
Erikson conceived eight stages of development, each confronting the individual with its own psychosocial demands, continuing into old age.
Personality development, according to Erikson, takes place through a series of crises that must be overcome and internalized by the individual to prepare for the next developmental stage.
Erickson's writings on social psychology, individual identity, and the interactions of psychology with history, politics and culture influenced professional approaches to psychosocial problems and attracted widespread interest among laymen.
Erickson in the late 1930s began his first studies of cultural influences on psychological development, working with Sioux Indian children at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
These studies eventually contributed to Erikson's theory that all societies develop institutions to accommodate personality development but that the typical solutions to similar problems arrived at by different societies are different.
Erikson encouraged generations of students to psychoanalytic study of historical figures with his works titled "Young Man Luther," published in 1958, and "Gandhi's Truth," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970.