What to me as a pediatrician is most fascinating about Erik Erikson is the contrast between his achievements and his own childhood and formal education. You know that he has been Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, and for the last 10 years University Professor at Harvard. As you may also know, a University Professor is someone whose knowledge is considered so profound and so broad that he can't be confined to any one University department. Erik Erikson has also been a distinguished psychoanalyst who has expanded significantly the concepts given us by Freud. Yet if he had been your patient in his youth, you would have shaken your head gravely. And if you had been considering him for admission to medical school or to the American Academy of Pediatrics, you would have found him completely lacking in formal qualifications.
He was born of Danish parents who separated during his infancy. His mother then took him to live with friends in Germany, where she eventually married her son's doctor. Thus Erik, by adoption, became the son of a pediatrician. He always teases us about this fact.
All through school he was a notoriously poor student, except in art and in ancient history. Instead of going on to the university, when he graduated from high school at the age of 18, he became a wanderer. As what we would call today a "hippie" or "alienated person," he wandered for a year through the Black Forest and up to Lake Constance doing nothing that would be called work or study, at least by American standards.