Non-Indian Residents of Stockbridge, MA: Erik Erikson

When he was growing up in Germany, Erik Erikson was Erik Homberger. He was brought up to think that his stepfather, Theodor Homberger, was his biological father. Young Erik must have been confused at some point: since both of his parents were Jewish, how did he get a head of Scandinavian blond, hair?

When he was a young man, Erik Homberger changed his name to Erik Erikson. Symbolically, he was claiming to be his own father. Erikson was a psychoanalyst and author. He coined the term identity crisis.

Before mental health counseling was a common thing, Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis. Since scientific methods and standards still hadn't been established back then, Freud managed, for some time, to claim on one hand that psychoanalysis was a science, while, on the other hand, making it into something like a religion with himself as the high priest. Freud had more than his share of followers. Psychoanalytic practitioners for some years were all medical doctors who had undergone analysis either on Freud's own couch or the couch of one of his followers.

But Freud eventually lost his paternalistic hold over psychoanalysis and talk therapy. Starting with Carl Jung, many of his followers broke away from his quasi-religious organization. I'm speculating now, but perhaps that is why, later in his life, Freud advocated for "lay-analysts," that is, he wanted those who were not medical doctors to be allowed into training to become psychoanalysts. (Maybe Freud was hoping lay analysts would be more loyal to his system.)

Erik Erikson was teaching art when he met Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter. Erikson went on to become probably the most famous lay analyst. One of the criticisms of Freud, the master, is that he developed a "theory of psychosexual development" with five stages, without ever actually studying children or adolescents. But Anna Freud studied children and adolescents. For Anna Freud, sexuality was much less important in human development. Erik Erikson was in that same camp. He adapted Sigmund Freud's developmental stages and called them stages of "psychosocial development."

 
[caption id="attachment_7185" align="aligncenter" width="599"] The pioneering mental hospital that brought Erik Erikson to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.[/caption]

After laying out those stages in his most famous book, Childhood and Society, Erikson left Berkeley, California and moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Deborah Solomon, in her book American Mirror (2013, 288), says that Erikson was lured to Stockbridge's pioneering mental hospital, the Austen Riggs Center, with "the promise of a light clinical load and ample time to spend writing his next book."