Obituary: Erik Erikson (1902-1994)

After Freud, no single psychoanalyst has more profoundly influenced world culture and society than Erik Erikson; in his lifetime he was undoubtedly the psychoanalyst best known and most deeply esteemed as well as most widely influential in the total socio-historical surround. His books, from their publication, and continuing essentially unabated until today, have been core curriculum in university courses on human development, on the life cycle, and on psychological perspectives on history and biography, across the United States and in many other parts of the world.

His contributions to the world, and to psychoanalysis within it, have indeed been monumental: the extension of the developmental stages to encompass the entire life span through adolescence, adulthood and into ageing and senescence; the cogwheeling of the life stages through the succession of generations and imbricating as well with the sociohistorical surround, for each specific individual at a unique place in society and history; the conception of the psychosocial developmental process, broadening Freud's psychosexual developmental ladder and embedding each individual development into its social context. Best known is his elaboration of the identity crisis, and the risk of identity diffusion in the life stage of adolescence, with its saving adolescent moratorium, which made him so much a culture hero and almost a cult figure to generations of our youth, especially during the world-wide youth rebellions of the turbulent 1960s.

These massive achievements have been embedded in a succession of fourteen books, of which the most significant and best known include the very first, Childhood and Society (1950), which instantly made Erik a household name in both the psychoanalytic world and the wider culture; Young Man Luther (1958) and Gandhi's Truth (1969), which helped establish the nascent fields of psychohistory and psychobiography, inextricably linked with Erikson's name; and ending in the final coauthored V