Erik Erikson was born on June 15th of 1902 to Danish parents near Frankfurt, Germany. Erikson began his adult life by traveling all over Europe as an artist. When he returned to Germany, he began teaching in for a private school in Vienna. In 1927, he began taking psychoanalyst classes under the direction of Anna Freud. In 1933 he moved to America where he became Boston's first child analyst. When he arrived, he began teaching at Harvard. From Harvard, he moved on teaching at such prestigious places as Yale, Berkeley, the Menninger Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, and the Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco.

Erikson gained much of his psychological thinking from his studies under Anna Freud. Although many of their views were the same however, they also had different views on many things as well. Erikson stated the predetermined steps below...