The man who coined identity crisis invented his own surname
Erik Erikson was born Erik Salomonsen, grew up as Erik Homburger, and was told for years that his stepfather was his real father. He never learned who his biological father was. Small wonder that the psychoanalyst who gave us the phrase identity crisis made identity the centre of his life's work.
Karla Abrahamsen, his mother, belonged to a well-known Copenhagen Jewish family. Estranged from her husband when she became pregnant by a non-Jewish Dane, she fled to Frankfurt, where Erik was born on 15 June 1902. In 1905 she married Theodor Homburger, a Jewish paediatrician in Karlsruhe, who formally adopted Erik in 1911. The truth about his parentage emerged only in late childhood, and he stayed bitter about the deception for life.
A tall, blond, blue-eyed boy raised Jewish, he was mocked as Nordic at temple school and as Jewish at grammar school. He finished school without distinction, went to art school in Munich instead of medical school as his stepfather wished, then wandered Germany and Italy as an artist with his friend Peter Blos, trading sketches as he went. He later described his adolescent identity confusion as bordering on neurosis.
At 25 Blos invited him to Vienna to teach art at a small school for children whose wealthy parents were in analysis with Anna Freud. She noticed his gift with children and encouraged him to train at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, where he specialised in child analysis and was himself analysed by her. He also studied the Montessori method. His 1933 diploma from the institute and his Montessori diploma were the only credentials he ever earned.
Without a university degree, he nonetheless became a professor at Harvard, Berkeley and Yale. When he started at Yale he replaced Homburger with Erikson, a name he made up, and the family adopted it on becoming American citizens; his children were reportedly glad no longer to be teased as Hamburger. His daughter felt his true psychoanalytic identity began with that choice. Best known for his theory of psychosocial development, he was ranked the 12th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century in a 2002 survey. He died on 12 May 1994.
Source: Erik Erikson
