218 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
Personality always develops during a particular historical period and within
a given society. Nevertheless, Erikson believed that the eight developmental stages
transcend chronology and geography and are appropriate to nearly all cultures, past
and present.Erikson’s Methods of Investigation
Erikson insisted that personality is a product of history, culture, and biology; and
his diverse methods of investigation reflect this belief. He employed anthropo-
logical, historical, sociological, and clinical methods to learn about children, ado-
lescents, mature adults, and elderly people. He studied middle-class Americans,
European children, people of the Sioux and Yurok nations of North America, and
even sailors on a submarine. He wrote biographical portraits of Adolf Hitler,
Maxim Gorky, Martin Luther, and Mohandas K. Gandhi, among others. In this
section, we present two approaches Erikson used to explain and describe human
personality—anthropological studies and psychohistory.Anthropological Studies
In 1937, Erikson made a field trip to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South
Dakota to investigate the causes of apathy among Sioux children. Erikson (1963)
reported on early Sioux training in terms of his newly evolving theories of psy-
chosexual and psychosocial development. He found that apathy was an expres-
sion of an extreme dependency the Sioux had developed as a result of their
reliance on various federal government programs. At one time, they had been
courageous buffalo hunters, but by 1937, the Sioux had lost their group identity
as hunters and were trying halfheartedly to scrape out a living as farmers. Child-
rearing practices, which in the past had trained young boys to be hunters and
young girls to be helpers and mothers of future hunters, were no longer appropri-
ate for an agrarian society. As a consequence, the Sioux children of 1937 had
great difficulty achieving a sense of ego identity, especially after they reached
adolescence.
Two years later, Erikson made a similar field trip to northern California to study
people of the Yurok nation, who lived mostly on salmon fishing. Although the Sioux
and Yurok had vastly divergent cultures, each tribe had a tradition of training its youth
in the virtues of its society. Yurok people were trained to catch fish, and therefore
they possessed no strong national feeling and had little taste for war. Obtaining and
retaining provisions and possessions were highly valued among people of the Yurok
nation. Erikson (1963) was able to show that early childhood training was consistent
with this strong cultural value and that history and society helped shape personality.Psychohistory
The discipline called psychohistory is a controversial field that combines psycho-
analytic concepts with historical methods. Freud (1910/1957) originated psychohis-
tory with an investigation of Leonardo da Vinci and later collaborated with