Erik Ericson Essay

1816 Words8 Pages
Erik Erikson: Theory of Personality Erik Homberger’s theory of development is perhaps one of the most widely applied models to emerge from the field of psychology during the last century. In 1927, Erik Homburger took a job in a school established for children of Sigmund Freud’s patients and friends. Erik became friendly with the psychoanalysts and later was trained them. Unfortunately, Erik never received a university degree. When Erik came to the United States, he then changed his name from Homburger to Erikson. He than began to practice psychotherapy and open his own views on the nature of human personality (Burger, 109-110). Although Erikson had retained numerous ideas from his mentor, Freud, he had ideas of his own also. Erikson is a Freudian ego-psychologist, which means that he accepts Freud’s ideas as correct and accepts the ideas about the ego that were added by other Freudian loyalists. Erikson is much more society and culture oriented than most Freudians and he often pushes the instincts and the unconscious practically out of the picture (Webspace). Erikson initially felt as if his own theory was an elaboration of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Eventually, Erikson decided that he had disagreed with some of Freud’s ideas. Although, Erikson felt Freud was correct at pointing out that people go through specific stages in order to develop their personality, but Erikson came to believe that Freud overemphasized the role that sexual development plays and how Freud had neglected adult personality development (8 Stages). Sigmund Freud only had five stages of development with his psychosexual stages, but Erikson believed that there should be eight. Erikson believed that every human being goes through a certain number of stages to reach his or her full development (Psych Wiki). Freud’s theory states that human development ends at around the
Open Document