Eric Erikson.. Psychological fragility that hid under the mask of the great psychologist

Throughout the not-so-long history of contemporary psychology, the Freudian school has dominated the space aimed at understanding what the human psyche is, its shortcomings, and its tricks.

From the heart of the Freudian school itself, a generation of scientists emerged who carried Freud's message in psychoanalysis on their shoulders, and were keen to develop it, and there is no better example of these than the German psychologist Erich Erikkon.

Erikson lived a life full of wanderings, and he suffered several shocks during his life, and these traumas not only contributed to the refinement of Erikson's personality, but also to the formation of the nucleus of his most famous theory, "Psychosocial development", which is to this day one of the most famous theories in the field of space. psychology.

who are you then?

This theory is an extension of Freud's theory of the five stages of child development. Each stage contains a pivotal conflict, either man succeeds in overcoming it and acquires the virtue of this stage, or he fails in that and suffers from the crisis associated with the stage.

Erikson believed in the importance of one's environment in shaping one's self-awareness, adaptability and identity, why not he lived his whole life with an "identity crisis" due to the absence of his biological father, the deception of his mother and adoptive father, and his frequent movement between countries, without a sense of belonging. to any place or anyone.

Ericsson's theory is divided into 8 stages (1) that extend throughout the lifespan of a person, and one must go through these stages in order, starting with the stage of confidence, then independence, and then initiative at the age of about 5 years, and the mother's interest and encouragement plays a pivotal role in overcoming these stages. stages successfully.

Next comes the stage of proving proficiency, usually with learning reading, writing, and other skills that the child acquires through school, followed by the more dangerous stage of finding an identity.

Failure at this stage results in feelings of inadequacy and a loss of identity, which Erikson himself has experienced throughout his life.

Eric Erickson

After adolescence and up to the age of forty, the human crisis is to find love.

Either he succeeds in having an intimate relationship and having a family, or he fails and suffers loneliness and isolation for the rest of his life.

After the age of forty, comes the turn of giving, where one should leave his mark in the world, not only through his work, but also through raising his children.

Success in this stage, which extends until the age of sixty-five, leads to a feeling of benefit and achievement and the acquisition of the virtue of consideration, while failure in it leads to stagnation and a feeling of separation from society.

As for the last stage of the human life cycle from Erikson's perspective, which begins around retirement, it revolves around achieving perfection and life satisfaction.

When a person retires from work, and begins to review his past and what he achieved during it, he thinks about his successes and failures and the achievements he has achieved. Either he will reach contentment and wisdom if his life goes well, or he will slip into despair and bitterness over the lost life.

Read more: How to raise a confident child?

Confidence

“Hope is an indispensable virtue that holds the secret of our survival.”

And since we are talking about the same man who founded that theory, what do you think we should apply it to his life (as he himself did before)?

(2) (3) It begins with Carla Abrahamsen, an intelligent, cultured and beautiful Danish girl, who married a Jewish merchant named Waldemar Salomonsen, but for some reason we do not know he ran away from the house immediately after the wedding and never saw him again.

Several years later, when Carla found out she was pregnant by an unknown man, and to avoid scandal, her family sent her to Germany to live with some of her aunts, and to give birth to her child there on a hot June day in 1902. The relationship was between Carla and her son, who would grow up to be " Eric Erikson is a firm in her early years.

Carla loved reading, so Eric always linked reading to his memories with his mother, and the Danish language was the special bond between them, while they lived in a German-speaking country.

Eric cherished the times he and his mother exchanged glances, that intelligent, helpful and sad lonely mother who, despite her harsh situation in northern Germany far from her family, was able to protect her son and give him happiness, confidence, and hope.

This confidence that Eric gained from his mother in the first months of his life was reflected in his confidence in himself and in the world later, and gave him always hope in his future endeavors, as well as the ability to form good social relationships later.

Independence and initiative

"He who is ashamed, wishes to turn the world's eyes away from him so that he may not notice his weakness. He wishes to destroy the eyes of the world."

In the early years, Carla was interested in developing her son's abilities, especially when he showed an artistic sense that he might have gained from her mixing with the Bohemian artists in the city, so that his initial impression of masculinity gained through them.

When Erikson later developed his theory of psychosocial development, he considered that the period from 18 months to 3 years of age was important for acquiring independence and a sense of initiative.

Here, Ericsson's life was going well, until a powerful competitor pushed him out of the spotlight.

Erickson was three when his mother took him to the doctor due to an ailment, and the doctor and mother unexpectedly admired each other, and not long after they were married on Eric's third birthday.

This was probably the first crisis that Eric faced in his life, to have his mother's attention taken away from him.

Despite the harm done to Eric, his stepfather raised him as if he were his own son, gave him his name "Eric Hamburger", and stipulated that Carla not tell the child that he was not his legitimate father.

But despite the couple's eagerness to raise Eric as their son, the youngster felt that something wasn't right, and in his later years, he remembered this period as deceptive love.

Incompetence and loss of identity

In the social jungle of human existence, you cannot feel alive without a sense of identity.

Young Eric's life was turned upside down when he was only eight years old, after his mother gave birth to his sister, "Ruth".

Theodore, Carla's husband, experiences a different feeling about his own daughter, and for some reason decides to confess to Eric the fact that he is not his biological father, and no one knows who his father really is.

Not only did Eric lose his adoptive father that day, but he felt that he had been cheated all his life, and this left him feeling a sense of loss of identity.

What reinforced this feeling in him was the reticence with which his mother's family greeted him in Copenhagen, and their lack of enthusiasm for his innocent relationship with his cousin Henrietta.

There were always attempts to obliterate this child's past and origin, and a kind of stimulus always hung over the air between the Abrahamsin family and the Hamburger family, and the child could not help but feel all this and miss the years when he lived alone with his mother.

At the age of 8-12 years, according to Erikson's theory, children develop a sense of competition, and the constant comparison between their performance, and while Eric was talented in the arts and excelled in history, he was an average student in school in general.

Here a sense of inadequacy began to grow within Eric, a feeling that would accompany him to his deathbed, and would torment him for the rest of his life.

As a result, Eric has been lying on his face for years, studying art and wandering around Europe aimlessly in search of an illusory trace of his father he never knew, and a sense of loss of identity grows within him more and more.

According to Erikson's theory, the identity crisis arises in adolescence, the critical stage in which the adolescent experiences everything around him, explores the world and decides his role in it.

If the adolescent succeeds in achieving his identity at that stage, he will acquire the virtue of sincerity, which enables him to establish healthy relationships in the next stage of his life, in addition to forming his self-image, and determining his professional future and what he wishes to become in the later stages of his life.

On the other hand, the failure to find one's identity causes an "identity crisis", in which a person does not know who he is or what he should do in his life, and he remains suspicious of his achievements throughout his life.

“Seeing a child playing is very similar to seeing an artist paint, because in play the child says a lot without saying a word.”

After spending several years desperately trying to find himself, Eric realizes that he will never be an artist, and returns to Germany, where he plunges into a deep fit of despair and depression.

At the age of twenty-five, fate opened a new door for Eric to discover his true passion in psychoanalysis, helped by his close friend "Peter Bloss", whom he had met while traveling in Europe.

Bloss was close to the family of the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud in Vienna, and invited Eric to help him develop the curriculum for the school that Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham had opened specifically for Bloss.

The owners gave them complete freedom to decide the syllabus, and the results were great.

Anna observed how Erickson treated the children, and was impressed by his ability to communicate with them, so she decided to accept him to learn psychoanalysis, even though he did not have a proper college education, in fact he had no college education at all.

Erikson's relationship with the Freud family was the real breakthrough that earned him a reputation as a psychologist in later years and even today.

Eric says in his memoirs, "Anna Freud and others from his circle embraced me [meaning Freud himself], and gave me the work of my life."

Anna Freud

Intimacy and intimacy

"Life is meaningless without being dependent on each other. We need each other, and the sooner we realize that the better for everyone."

At the age of twenty-seven, having established himself as a teacher at Hietzing and gaining the approval of Anna Freud, Eric met Joan Cerson.

Joanne was a twenty-six-year-old Canadian girl, tall, smart-eyed, who had come to Vienna to complete her studies in contemporary dance when Eric first caught her eye.

Eric Erickson with his wife Joan

In a way, Eric's relationship with Joan was a reflection of Carla's relationship with Eric's unknown father.

Eric was convinced without clear evidence that his father was a touring artist like him, and when Joan became pregnant with him before marriage and he wanted to elude her, some friends reminded him of his father and what he had done with him.

Here Eric decides not to repeat his father's mistake and expose his child to a loss of identity and loss, as happened to him, and he and Joanne married in 1930. Joan joined work at the school next to Eric, and became a close friend of the Freud family.

The couple have three sons, Kai, Jun and Sue, and form a happy little family with some financial hardships.

The couple's relationship was characterized not by outright love, but by mutual trust and loyalty, as Joanne was able to build an emotional and social supportive base for her emotionally troubled husband.

"It would have been nothing without Joan," Eric's half-sister says, and Eric agrees.

Simultaneously with his attainment of intimacy, Eric was steadily striving to learn psychoanalysis and immerse himself more and more in the realms of psychology, by studying children in his school, and mixing with Freud and his inner circle.

Fam photo with my wife and kids❤️ #Kai #Jon #Sue #thewifeyJoan pic.twitter.com/URHIDsRsKB

— Erik Erikson (@EErikson02) September 9, 2015

Giving

“The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.”

After the Heitzing School closed in 1932 due to disagreements in the way it was managed, and with anti-Jewish hatred on the rise in Nazi Germany, Erickson decided to flee with his family to America, where it would be safer.

At that point he had already been trained by Anna Freud in psychoanalytic methods, and had gained considerable experience which later opened the door for him to join the American Psychoanalytic Association as the first child psychologist in Boston.

Erickson got a job at Harvard and later Yale through some acquaintances.

During that period, Erikson was very interested in studying the children of the "Sioux" tribes from the original inhabitants of America, and after them the children of the "Yurok" tribes when he moved to work in California, and in those years the contents of the book that made Erikson widely known after It was published in the early fifties.

The book "Childhood and society" contains Erikson's most important theories on the development of identity, the eight stages of human development from birth to death, in addition to the influence of culture and social life on the development of the child based on his observations of indigenous children.

Childhood and Society by Eric Erickson

In her article published in "The Atlantic" in 1999, Sue Ericson, his youngest daughter, remembers how things changed after the publication of "Childhood and Society", Sue says: "My father became the center of the glamorous attention in most social and professional gatherings, people gathered around him. Enthusiasm appeared on their faces, each of them waiting for their turn to interact with him.

(4)

su ericsson

perfect

 He has always aroused in those close to him the desire to reassure and console him, to make him feel respected and loved, to help him combat his lifelong feeling of inadequacy and an overwhelming feeling of self-doubt.

Sue Ericsson - Article "Fame"

Eriksson had a kind face and warm eyes, as well as a white face tinged with blush that gave the impression of a constant sense of shame.

His features, along with his gray hair, added an aura of dignity around him, and made him accepted and loved by people.

Erikson published several important books, and even after retiring from his last post at Harvard at the age of 68, continued to write about the personality changes that come with age.

Erikson was respected and admired by the scientific community as well, winning a Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his book "Ghandi's Truth," which tells of Gandhi's struggle to establish the principle of nonviolence in India, and he accomplished all this at an age appropriate stage before he retired .

Gandhi's Truth Book - Eric Erikson 1969

In spite of Ericsson's remarkable achievements throughout his life, a grim feeling of inadequacy continued to weigh upon him, and he searched the eyes of those around him for reassurances that he was worthy and loved, and this sickening feeling haunted him until his last days.

The child inside the old Ericson could not get over the pain of losing his father who did not know him, and the deceit of his mother and her husband to him, and throughout his life he tried to make up for this pain with more and more achievements, successes and social relations, but in vain.

Although Eric Erikson ranks ninth in the list of the 100 most prominent psychologists of the twentieth century (5), and his theories are taught in universities to this day, the confident man on the outside, very fragile on the inside, has left the world and he has not yet reached the stage of perfection and contentment About himself, he left believing that he was not worthy of love.

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