Erik Erikson, 91; Pioneering Psychoanalyst

Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst who extended Freudian theory into adolescence and adulthood and coined the phrase “identity crisis,” died Thursday. He was 91.

Erikson died at the Rosewood Manor Nursing Home, said Diana Eck, a Harvard professor and friend.

His book “Gandhi’s Truth” won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1970.

In it and other books, such as “Young Man Luther” in 1958, Erikson encouraged the psychoanalytic study of historical figures. He also wrote biographies of Jesus, Albert Einstein, William James and Charles Darwin.

With the books on Gandhi and Luther alone, one reviewer noted, “Erikson has single-handedly rescued psychoanalytic biography from neglect and disrepute.”

His work helped popularize psychoanalysis and he has been called “the most widely known and read psychoanalyst in America.”

Erikson, who broke major ground in the study of human development, emphasized social relationships rather than sexual needs as the key to growing up.

“As they used to say of Gandhi, he was a mahatma, a great soul,” said Eck, “very wise, a very wide-ranging humanist and someone who really illuminated the stages of the life cycle from birth to death.”

Born to Danish parents on June 15, 1902, in Frankfurt, Germany, Erikson graduated from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute and studied under Anna Freud. He immigrated to the United States in 1933 and became a naturalized citizen in 1939.

A professor emeritus at Harvard University, where he retired in 1970, Erikson had also taught and practiced at Yale, UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kan., the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass., Western Psychiatric Institute in Pittsburgh, MIT and the University of Pittsburgh.

Among his other books were “Childhood and Society” in 1950, “Identity and the Life Cycle” in 1959, “Identity: Youth and Crisis” in 1968, “Toys and Reasons: Stages in the Ritualizations of Experience” in 1976, and a collection of his papers, “A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980” in 1987.