Erik Homburger Erikson was born on June 15, 1902 in Frankfurt, Germany to Danish parents. He grew up in Europe and spent his young adult life under the training of Sigmund Freud. After he got his certification from the Maria Montessori School, he then did psychoanalytic training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1933 Erickson moved to the United States where he began teaching at Yale University. During this time, he did a lot of clinical work and studies based on groups of American Indian children, college students, world war two victims, children and civil rights workers. It was these studies which helped Erickson to believe that Sigmund Feud had misjudged some important aspects of human development.
Erickson’s most important work was his theory the Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development which started in 1950. These stages were built off of Sigmund Freud's psychosexual theory of development to which Erikson added three stages of adulthood. Erikson believed that every human being goes through a certain number of stages to reach their full development. This psychosocial theory is unique because it covers the entire life cycle and pinpoints the effect of society, history and culture on personality. Erikson said that development functions by the epigenetic principle. Which means that we mature according to steps predetermined of our personalities in eight stages that extend from birth to death. One of the main elements of the theory is the development of ego identity. Erickson believed that our ego identity changes often because of new experiences and information that we get in our daily interactions with others. Each of these eight stages is linked to one another and they present a crisis or conflict that a person must resolve before they can successfully move on to the next stage. Erickson believed that the order of the stages was set by nature. He also believed that the result of one stage is not permanent and can be changed by later...