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ERIK ERIKSON, 91, PSYCHOANALYST WHO RESHAPED VIEWS OF HUMAN GROWTH, DIES

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The New York Times, Friday, May 13, 1994 - Page B4

(Excerpts)

  Erik H. Erikson, the psychoanalyst who profoundly reshaped views of human
development, died yesterday at the Rosewood Manor Nursing Home in Harwich,
Mass. He was 91.

  A friend and disciple of Sigmund Freud, Mr. Erikson was a thinker whose
ideas had effects far beyond psychoanalysis, shaping emerging fields of
child development and life-span studies and reaching into the humanities.

  He was best known for the theory that each stage of life, from infancy on,
is associated with specific psychological struggle that contributes to a
major aspect of personality.

  That represented a quantum leap in Freudian thought, suggesting that the
ego and the sense of identity are shaped over the entire span and that
experiences later in life might help heal the hurts of early childhood.

  Mr. Erikson's influence, compounded by clinical studies of children, a
teaching post at Harvard University, popular lectures and bestselling
books on Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther, pervaded many layers of
society, from education to medicine to law to biography to psychiatry to
lowbrow culture.

   His popular recognition reached a peak in the 70's, particularly because
of his identification with the development of "identity crisis," a term
he coined.  But his scholarly contributions have assured him of a place of
eminence in many disciplines.

   A crucial element in the theory of successive changes in personality,
and hence ego modification, was that the dynamics of the society in which
a person lived determined to what extent these changes are resolved. By
placing the individual in a societal matrix, Mr. Erikson could suggest
the degree to which political, economic and social systems, all exterior
forces, mold a person's interior emotional life. In that manner he sought
a union between psychoanalysis and the social sciences.

   Mr. Erikson theorized that all the crises, including the last, have
positive and negative solutions, mediated strongly by milieu and other
cultural and soceital factors. But whatever the solution, at each stage
the crisis has to be resolved if the person is to be unharmed by dread
or neurosis. The role of society, and even that of contemporary history.
applies directly, at least from adolescence onward.

  The evolution of his ideas emerged to a definable extent from his life
experiences and froma long habit of trusting his artistic eye and his
belief in the efficacy of his intuition.

   Mr. Erikson also worked at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, coming into
contact with Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and Ruth Benedict, the
anthropologists, and Henry Murray and Kurt Lewin, the psychologists.  He then
went to Yale as a fulltime researcher at the Institute of Human Relations and,
eventually, as a professor at the medical school.

  The development of his thought, he said, was from case history to life
history to social and cultural factors.  In the pursuit of the social and
cultural, he left Yale in 1938 to study the early childhood training of
the Sioux on a reservation in South Dakota.  That was the start of a life
concern to demonstrate how the universal events of childhood were affected
and molded by society.

  Mr. Erikson's reputation was limited, however, until the publication in
1950 of "Childhood and Society," which laid out his theories on the stage
development of life. The book, which attained a popular audience and
established Mr. Erikson as a generative thinker, had profound effects
on many educators, psychologists and other specialists who had accepted
Freud's views of childhood.

  Mr. Erikson's book, which has been a steady seller over the years in many
languages, was one anchor of his fame. Two others were "Young Man Luther"
(1958) and "Gandhi's Truth" (1969), both psychobiographies in which men of
great gifts discover themselves and their roles in relation to their times
in adulthood.  "Gandhi's Truth" won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book
Award.

  Before writing those books Mr. Erikson became a cause celebre by leaving
the University of California in 1950 rather than sign a loyalty oath.
Not a Communist, Mr. Erikson spurned the oath on First Amendment grounds
and created a considerable hubbub.  He stood fast, and he said later that
he felt that his attitude had been among his finest moments.

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* Erik Erikson was born on June 15, 1902, in Frankfurt, Germany, of Danish
  parents.

TZ