Description: This is the first authorised biography of Erik Erikson, America's most influential postwar psychoanalyst and developmental psychologist. Drawing on private material and extensive interviews with Erikson's family, students, and closest colleagues around the world, award-winning historian Lawrence J. Friedman illuminates the relationship between Erikson's personal life and his groundbreaking ideas.

Erik Erikson acutely reshaped views of human development with his concept of identity and his eight-stage model of the human life-cycle. Identity's Architect explains that the concept of the "identity crisis" was deeply rooted in this remarkable man's life.

As he illuminates the interaction between Erikson's personal life and the ideas and writings that have had such lasting influence on our culture, Friedman focuses on Erikson's lifelong quest to find the identity of his own father. Born in Denmark to an unmarried Jewish mother, Erikson did not know who his biological father was. Friedman suggests that the circumstances of Erikson's childhood later prompted him to investigate the basis for a constant, enduring identity "because that pursuit... was vital to his personal quest for self-identity".

Erikson's insight that the human being progresses through eight distinct stages from infancy through maturity was intimately connected, Friedman shows, to the crisis over the birth of his developmentally handicapped son.

This exhaustively researched, compelling biography is indispensable for anyone who hopes to understand fully one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century and his ideas about identity, psychological transitions in childhood and adult life.

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