The Epigenetic Principle......................................................................................................5 Stages of Development........................................................................................................6 Stage One.............................................................................................................................7 Stage Two............................................................................................................................7 Stage Three..........................................................................................................................8 Stage Four............................................................................................................................8 Stage Five............................................................................................................................9 Stage Six..............................................................................................................................9 Stage Seven........................................................................................................................10 Stage Eight.........................................................................................................................10

One of the most influential psychoanalysts of the 20th century, Erik Erikson was born on June 15, 1902, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. After completing high school, he moved to Florence to pursue his interest in art, and in 1927 became an art teacher at a psychoanalytically enlightened school for children started by Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud in Vienna.

The move changed his life and career. He earned a certificate from the Maria Montessori School, and then embarked on psychoanalytic training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. By 1936, he had joined the Institute of Human Relations, part of the department of psychiatry at Yale University.

Erikson's best known work is his theory that each stage of life is associated with a specific psychological struggle, a struggle that contributes to a major aspect of personality. His developmental progression-from trust to autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, intimacy, generativity, and integrity-was conceived as the sequential reorganization of ego and character structures. Each phase was the potential root of later health and pathology.

By focusing on the social as well as the psychological, Erikson's stages represented a quantum leap in Freudian thought, which had emphasized the psychosexual nature of development. While much of his theoretical work has since been challenged, Erikson's basic developmental framework-conflict negotiated in the context of relationships-continues to illuminate our thinking, as does the identity crisis, the confusion of roles that Erikson first identified.

More enduring is his broader attempt to place childhood squarely in the context of society. It was Erikson who first eloquently developed the idea that children are not simply biological organisms that endure, nor products of the psyche in isolation. Rather, they develop in the context of society's expectations, prohibitions, and prejudices.

Erikson's fieldwork among the Yurok and Sioux demonstrated the powerful influence of culture. His synthesis of biological, psychological, and social perspectives signaled a revolution in human development and set the stage for today's increasingly accepted view of development as a bio-psychosocial process.