Erik Erikson

Erik Homburger Erikson (1902 to 1994) was a German-American child psychoanalyst and visual artist best known for his theory of the psychosocial development of human beings. He coined the phrase identity crisis. Although he had no university degree, he served as a professor at prominent institutions including Harvard, the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale, and a survey published in the Review of General Psychology in 2002 ranked him the twelfth most eminent psychologist of the twentieth century. This entry records his place in the Education atlas as a developmental theorist who taught at university level, while the psychological account of his theory is carried by the matching entry in the Psychology atlas.