Erikson



Educational Background:
====Erikson was a student and teacher of arts. While teaching at a private school in [|Vienna], he became acquainted with [|Anna Freud], the daughter of [|Sigmund Freud]. Erikson underwent psychoanalysis, and the experience made him decide to become an analyst himself. He was trained in psychoanalysis at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute and also studied the [|Montessori method] of education, which focused on child development and sexual stages. ====

Family Background:
====Born in [|Frankfurt], Erik Erikson's lifelong interest in the psychology of identity may be traced to his birth. He was born on June 15, 1902. The circumstances of his birth were concealed from him in his childhood. His [|Danish]-born mother, Karla Abrahamsen, came from a prominent [|Jewish] family in [|Copenhagen]. At the time of her son's birth in [|Germany], Karla Abrahamsen had not seen her husband, [|Jewish] stockbroker Waldemar Isidor Salomonsen, for several months. Nonetheless, the boy was registered as Erik Salomonsen. There is no more information about his biological father, except that he was a Dane and his given name probably was Erik. It is also suggested that he was married at the time that Erikson was conceived. Following her son's birth, Karla trained to be a nurse, moved to [|Karlsruhe] and in 1905, married a Jewish pediatrician, Theodor Homburger. In 1908, Erik Salomonsen became Erik Homburger and in 1911 he was officially adopted by his stepfather. ==== ====The development of [|identity] seems to have been one of Erikson's greatest concerns in his own life as well as in his theory. During his childhood and early adulthood he was known as Erik Homberger, and his parents kept the details of his birth a secret. He was a tall, blond, blue-eyed boy who was raised in the Jewish religion. At temple school, the kids teased him for being a [|Nordic]; at grammar school, they teased him for being Jewish ====

Quotations:
====1. The fact remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative. ====

====2. The American adolescent, then, is faced, as are the adolescents of all countries who have entered or are entering the machine age, with the question: freedom from what and at what price? The American feels so rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what it is he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them. ====

====3. Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably. His triumphs will be measured against this smallness, his defeats will substantiate it. The questions as to who is bigger and who can do or not do this or that, and to whom--these questions fill the adult's inner life far beyond the necessities and the desirabilities which he understands and for which he plans. ====

====4. The infant's first social achievement, then, is his willingness to let the mother out of sight without undue anxiety or rage, beca use she has become an inner certainty as well as an outer predictability. ====

====5. It is not easy to construct by mere scientific synthesis a foolproof system which will lead our children in a desired direction an d avoid an undesirable one. Obviously, good can come only from a continuing interplay between that which we, as students, are gradually learning and that which we believe in, as people. ====

====<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">6. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1.066em; line-height: 1.5;">It pays to ponder on this simple formula; it gets deeper as you think about it. ====

====<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">7. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1.066em; line-height: 1.5;">The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery....Child's play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experiment and planning. ====

====<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">8. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1.066em; line-height: 1.5;">Children must eventually train their own children, and any impoverishment of their impulse life, for the sake of avoiding friction, must be considered a possible liability affecting more than one lifetime ====

====<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">9. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1.066em; line-height: 1.5;">The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery....Child's play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experiment and planning. ====

====<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">10. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 1.066em; line-height: 1.5;">'Parents must not only have certain ways of guiding by prohibition and permission; they must also be able to represent to the child a deep, an almost somatic conviction that there is a meaning to what they are doing. Ultimately, children become neurotic not from frustrations, but from the lack or loss of societal meaning in these frustrations.'' ====

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