German-born American psychoanalyst whose expansion of Freudian theory into a life-span developmental psychology, and whose coinage of the phrase "identity crisis," gave the mid-20th century one of its most durable vocabularies for thinking about the self. Born in Frankfurt to a Jewish Danish mother, raised by her and a Jewish pediatrician stepfather whose surname he took (and later replaced), Erikson never knew his biological father — a fact his biographers have treated as the autobiographical ground of the theory of identity that would occupy his adult life. He trained as an artist, drifted across Europe, and in 1927 was hired to teach at a small school in Vienna run by Dorothy Burlingham for the children of Freud's circle; Anna Freud analyzed him and he trained as a lay analyst.
He emigrated to the United States in 1933, held appointments at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, and the Austen Riggs Center, and in Childhood and Society (1950) published the work that established him. Its central contribution — the "eight stages of psychosocial development," each organized around a characteristic tension (trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. shame, initiative vs. guilt, industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. role confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. stagnation, integrity vs. despair) — carried Freud's largely childhood-focused developmental theory across the entire human life span and insisted, against the more biologistic strain of psychoanalysis, that development was a social and cultural as well as a libidinal matter.
Erikson also essentially invented "psychohistory" as a genre with Young Man Luther (1958), a psychoanalytic study of Luther's identity crisis and its historical consequences, and Gandhi's Truth (1969, which won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award), on the crystallization of Gandhi's political identity in the 1918 Ahmedabad textile strike. He refused to sign the University of California loyalty oath in 1950 and resigned; he was a quiet figure in the movement to get psychoanalysis to take women and Black Americans as serious subjects rather than pathological cases; his wife and lifelong collaborator Joan Erikson wrote the crucial later chapters of the developmental theory.