Chapter 7 Erikson: Post-Freudian Theory 197A
s a child, Erik Salomonsen had many questions but few answers about his
biological 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
regarding 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 explana-
tion, 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 liai-
son between his mother and an artistically 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 seeking 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
appear 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 dif-
ficulty accepting 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 confu-
sion. 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 retained a long-held affinity for Denmark and the Danish people and took per-
verted 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,
psychohistory, and education.
Unlike earlier psychodynamic theorists who severed nearly all ties to Freudian
psychoanalysis, Erikson intended his theory of personality to extend rather than
repudiate Freud’s assumptions and to offer a new “way of looking at things”
(Erikson, 1963, p. 403). His post-Freudian theory extended Freud’s infantile devel-
opmental stages into adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Erikson suggested that
at each stage a specific psychosocial struggle contributes to the formation of per-
sonality. 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