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Welcome to this scientific symposium honoring and celebrating the life and work of Erik Erikson. It is very fitting that it should be under the joint auspices of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Foundation for Psychoanalysis. Erik was one of the founding members and pioneering teachers in our psychoanalytic institute, and after Freud, no single psychoanalyst has more profoundly influenced world culture and society than he, and very few have reshaped psychoanalytic perspectives as much as he. In terms of his lifetime of influence and achievement in many places and in many contexts, we have been happily fortunate that he and his wife Joan, whom, as I have indicated, we are honored to have with us today, spent more time living amongst us in our professional community than anywhere else in the world.
As a psychoanalyst, Erik's contributions have been monumental: the extension of the developmental stages to encompass the entire life span through adolescence, adulthood, and into aging and senescence; the interlocking of the life stages temporally, through the mutual fitting together over the succession of generations, and laterally, in interaction with the socio-historical surround, for each individual at a unique place in