Introduction

Erik H. Erikson (1902-1994) was, after two people surnamed Freud, the psychoanalyst best known to the educated public. His masterpiece, Childhood and Society (1950), inaugurated the life-span orientation in developmental psychology, and placed psychoanalytic theory firmly into social and historical contexts. He should need little introduction to readers of this journal who would know that his contributions to psychoanalysis and to general knowledge are of the first rank.

An artist and teacher, Erikson's range of interests even after he became an analyst were such that he can be considered almost solely responsible for the extension of a psychoanalytic sensibility to the fields of education, biography, sociology, and history. He is the acknowledged founder of life-span developmental psychology, of psychobiography, and of psychohistory. For many of us, his biopsy-chosocial approach was the first assertively nonmedical psychoanalytic model of the human condition, expanding a reductionistic and pathologizing vocabulary with his concept of life tasks and their derived vulnerabilities, strengths and virtues, related, nonetheless, to psychosexual stages. Erikson's life work seems, indeed, to go well beyond Hartmann's attempt to make psychoanalysis a general psychology. It serves instead to explore the not at all average expectable environment and to provide a multidisciplinary integration which breaks down false barriers between disciplines.