Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Erikson: Post−Freudian
Theory
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Companies, 2009A
s a child, Erik Salomonsen had many questions but few answers about his bio-
logical father. He knew who his mother was—a beautiful Jewish Dane whose
family tried hard to appear Danish rather than Jewish. But who was his father?
Born into a single-parent family, the young boy held three separate beliefs re-
garding his origins. At first, he believed that his mother’s husband, a physician named
Theodor Homburger, was his biological father. However, as Erik matured, he began
to realize that this was incorrect because his blond hair and blue eyes did not match
the dark features of either parent. He pressed his mother for an explanation, but she
lied to him and said that a man named Valdemar Salomonsen—her first husband—
was his biological father and that he abandoned her after she became pregnant with
Erik. However, Erik didn’t quite believe this second story either because he learned
that Salomonsen had left his mother 4 years before Erik was born. Finally, Erik chose
to believe that he was the outcome of a sexual liaison between his mother and an ar-
tistically gifted aristocratic Dane. For nearly the remainder of his life, Erik believed
this third story. Nevertheless, he continued to search for his own identity while seek-
ing the name of his biological father.
During his school days, Erik’s Scandinavian features contributed to his iden-
tity confusion. When he attended temple, his blue eyes and blond hair made him ap-
pear to be an outsider. At public school, his Aryan classmates referred to him as a
Jew, so Erik felt out of place in both arenas. Throughout his life, he had difficulty ac-
cepting himself as either a Jew or a Gentile.
When his mother died, Erik, then 58 years old, feared he would never know the
identity of his biological father. But he persevered in his search. Finally, more than
30 years later and as his mind and body began to deteriorate, Erik lost interest in
learning his father’s name. However, he continued to show some identity confusion.
For example, he spoke mostly in German—the language of his youth—and rarely
spoke in English, his primary language for more than 60 years. In addition, he re-
tained a long-held affinity for Denmark and the Danish people and took perverted
pride in displaying the flag of Denmark, a country in which he never lived.
Overview of Post-Freudian Theory
The person we introduced in the opening vignette, of course, was Erik Erikson, the
person who coined the term identity crisis.Erikson had no college degree of any
kind, but this lack of formal training did not prevent him from gaining world fame
in an impressive variety of fields including psychoanalysis, anthropology, psy-
chohistory, and education.
Unlike earlier psychodynamic theorists who severed nearly all ties to Freudian
psychoanalysis, Erikson intended his theory of personality to extend rather than re-
pudiate Freud’s assumptions and to offer a new “way of looking at things” (Erikson,
1963, p. 403). His post-Freudian theoryextended Freud’s infantile developmental
stages into adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Erikson suggested that at each stage
a specific psychosocial strugglecontributes to the formation of personality. From
adolescence on, that struggle takes the form of an identity crisis—a turning point in
one’s life that may either strengthen or weaken personality.
Erikson regarded his post-Freudian theory as an extension of psychoanalysis,
something Freud might have done in time. Although he used Freudian theory as the
Chapter 9 Erikson: Post-Freudian Theory 243