The Man Who Invented the Identity Crisis

Erik was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on 15 June 1902. His mother, Karla, was a young Danish Jewish woman. She never told him who his father was. When Erik was three, she married a Jewish children's doctor, Theodor Homburger. The boy became Erik Homburger. For years, he was told that Theodor was his real father.

But Erik began to suspect the truth. He was tall, with blond hair and blue eyes. He looked nothing like his parents. At the synagogue, other boys called him "the goy", the non-Jew. At school, other boys called him a Jew. He belonged to two worlds, and to neither. Later in life, he said he had always felt like an outsider.

He finished school in 1920, but he didn't go to university. Instead, he travelled around Europe for several years with a sketchbook. He wanted to be an artist. He slept in cheap rooms, drew people and places, and tried to work out who he was. He was lost, and he knew it.

In 1927, an old school friend invited him to Vienna. A small school there needed a teacher, and Erik was good with children. The pupils came from families close to Sigmund Freud. At the school, Erik met Freud's daughter, Anna, a pioneer of child psychology. She saw something special in him. She trained him as a psychoanalyst, a man without a degree. He also got a teaching certificate in Maria Montessori's method.

In Vienna he married Joan Serson, a Canadian dancer. In 1933, as the Nazis grew stronger, the family left for the United States. Erik became one of the first child psychoanalysts in Boston. Soon he was working at Harvard, then Yale, then Berkeley. He still had no degree. In 1939 he became an American citizen and chose a new name: Erik Erikson. It means "Erik, son of Erik". The boy with no father had become his own father.

Freud believed that our personality is mostly formed by the age of five or six. Erikson disagreed. He had watched children in Vienna, in Boston and in two Native American communities. He believed we keep developing all our lives. And he believed other people shape us at every step: family, friends, school and society. In 1950, in his book Childhood and Society, he described eight stages of life. At each stage we face a conflict between two forces. If we find a healthy balance, we gain a strength. He called it a virtue.

Stage five was the one Erikson knew best. He gave the world a new phrase for it: the identity crisis. He first used it for soldiers coming home from the Second World War. They had lost their sense of who they were. Soon the phrase was used for teenagers, and today everyone uses it.

In 1950, the University of California asked all its teachers to sign a loyalty oath, a promise that they were not communists. Erikson wasn't a communist, but he refused to sign, and he left his job. Later, his books made him famous. Gandhi's Truth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. Harvard made him a professor, the man who had never been to university.

His own life didn't always follow his theory. In 1944, Erik and Joan had a son, Neil, who was born with Down syndrome. On doctors' advice, as was common then, Neil was sent to live in an institution. The family rarely talked about him, and he died in 1965, still a young man. Years later, Erikson's daughter wrote a book about growing up with a famous father. She described a man who found it hard to be close to his own family.

Erikson never found out who his real father was. He kept searching until old age. In his eighties, he and Joan wrote about the last stage of life from the inside. He died in 1994, aged 91. Joan, then in her nineties, added a ninth stage to the theory: very old age, when the body grows weak and the old conflicts come back again.