On discovering her pregnancy, Karla fled to Frankfurt am Main in Germany where Erik was born on 15 June 1902 and was given the surname Salomonsen.

"[13] The decision to change his last name came about as he started his job at Yale, and the "Erikson" name was accepted by Erik's family when they became American citizens.

Uncertain about his vocation and his fit in society, Erik dropped out of school and began a lengthy period of roaming about Germany and Italy as a wandering artist with his childhood friend Peter Blos and others.

[16] During this period, which lasted until he was twenty-five years old, he continued to contend with questions about his father and competing ideas of ethnic, religious, and national identity.

[22][23] In 1933, with Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, the burning of Freud's books in Berlin, and the potential Nazi threat to Austria, the family left an impoverished Vienna with their two young sons and emigrated to Copenhagen.

[25] In the United States, Erikson became the first child psychoanalyst in Boston and held positions at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Judge Baker Guidance Center, and at Harvard Medical School and Psychological Clinic.

In 1936, Erikson left Harvard and joined the staff at Yale University, where he worked at the Institute of Social Relations and taught at the medical school.

This marked the beginning of Erikson's life passion of showing the importance of events in childhood and how society affects them.

During this time he also served as a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh where he worked with Benjamin Spock and Fred Rogers at Arsenal Nursery School of the Western Psychiatric Institute.

Although Erikson accepted Freud's theory, he did not focus on the parent-child relationship and gave more importance to the role of the ego, particularly the person's progression as self.

[34] According to Erikson, the environment in which a child lived was crucial to providing growth, adjustment, a source of self-awareness and identity.

Erikson won a Pulitzer Prize[35] and a US National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion[36] for Gandhi's Truth (1969),[37] which focused more on his theory as applied to later phases in the life cycle.

The term "virtue" refers to favorable outcomes of each stage and is used in the context of Erikson's work as it is applied to medicine, meaning "potencies".

These virtues are also interpreted to be the same as "strengths", which are considered inherent in the individual life cycle and in the sequence of generations.

Similarly, 'integrity' and 'despair' must both be understood and embraced, in order for actionable 'wisdom' to emerge as a viable solution at the last stage.

Erikson states it is essential to allow the children freedom in exploration but also create an environment welcoming of failures.

Guilt in this stage is characterized by a sense of being a burden to others, and the child will therefore usually present themselves as a follower as they lack the confidence to do otherwise.

Restriction from teachers or parents leads to doubt, questioning, and reluctance in abilities and therefore may not reach full capabilities.

[46] Ego development earlier in life (middle adolescence) is a strong predictor of how well intimacy for romantic relationships will transpire in emerging adulthood.

[54] Having a sense of generativity can be considered significant for both the individual and the society, exemplifying their roles as effective parents, leaders for organizations, etc.

[55] If a person is not comfortable with the way their life is progressing, they're usually regretful about the decisions that they have made in the past and feels a sense of uselessness.

"[58] Having a guilty conscience about the past or failing to accomplish important goals will eventually lead to depression and hopelessness.

Psychoanalytic writers have always engaged in nonclinical interpretation of cultural phenomena such as art, religion, and historical movements.

Erik Erikson gave such a strong contribution that his work was well received by students of religion and spurred various secondary literature.

[59] Erikson's psychology of religion begins with an acknowledgement of how religious tradition can have an interplay with a child's basic sense of trust or mistrust.

Erikson extends this construct by emphasizing that human individual and social life is characterized by ritualization, "an agreed-upon interplay between at least two persons who repeat it at meaningful intervals and in recurring contexts."

Such ritualization involves careful attentiveness to what can be called ceremonial forms and details, higher symbolic meanings, active engagement of participants, and a feeling of absolute necessity.

[62] Perhaps Erikson's best-known contributions to the psychology of religion were his book length psychobiographies, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, on Martin Luther, and Gandhi's Truth, on Mahatma Gandhi, for which he remarkably won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Both books attempt to show how childhood development and parental influence, social and cultural context, and even political crises form a confluence with personal identity.

These studies demonstrate how each influential person discovered mastery, both individually and socially, in what Erikson would call the historical moment.