Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1902, Erik Erikson briefly pursued art before earning a certificate in Montessori education. He then trained as a psychoanalyst with Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud. Erikson moved to Boston in 1933 to work as a child psychoanalysis and a research associate in psychology at Harvard, where he also studied psychology at the graduate level. Dissatisfied with the program, he left Harvard and subsequently began to study how cultural influences psychological development through observations of several Indigenous communities.

After moving to California, he became a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942 and began writing the essays that were published in his groundbreaking Childhood and Society. Published in 1950, the book set out his eight stages of the development of personality, a theory that would give him lasting fame as a pioneer in the field of psychosocial development.

 Erikson returned to Harvard in 1960 as a professor of human development. While at Harvard he published books including Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968) and Gandhi’s Truth (1969), winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He continued to write into his later years and died in 1994.

Along with Alfred Adler, Karl Jung, and German American psychologist Karen Horney, Erikson is today considered a “neo-Freudian”—a psychologist who believed in the importance of childhood experiences but stressed the importance of society and culture on human development.