Qualitative Family Research

A Newsletter of the Qualitative Family Research Network

National Council on Family Relations

Volume 8, Numbers 1 June 1993

Erik Erikson and the Use of Case Studies

By Jane Gilgun

L ike Freud and Piaget, Erik Erikson used a clinical case study approach to develop theories
that revolutionized Western thought. While most of us will not attain the genius of an
Erikson, Freud, or Piaget, we can emulate their methods and hope to bring greater
understanding to the issues of our day.

A "Field" Education

Erikson started but never completed a Ph.D. His education was life-long and in the
"field," learning from his patients, from his anthropological field work, from research interviews,
and from his colleagues. A great theorist, he developed his ideas from vital involvement with
other persons.

In his late twenties, he left his job as an itinerant sketcher of children to tutor children for
a summer. At summer's end, he founded a progressive school with his high school friend Peter
Blos and Anna Freud. He became Anna Freud's analysand. By 1933 he finished his analysis and
his training as a psychoanalyst and began to practice child analysis.

A Jew through his mother's second marriage, Erikson and his wife Joan left Vienna for
the United States to avoid what he thought would be a Nazi reign of terror. He became a child
analyst at the Harvard Medical School, where he was a colleague of anthropologists Margaret
Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Benedict, and the psychologists Kurt Lewin and Henry
Murray.

Work Based on Case Studies

He based all of his work on case studies. Childhood and Society, published in 1950, had
a profound effect on many disciplines and also attained a popular audience. Among its many
strengths was its grounding in cultural anthropology and social psychology, demonstrating the
various levels of social influences on human development.

He expanded these themes to two book-length case studies, Young Man Luther (l958) and
Gandhi's Truth (l969), whch won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer prize. His numerous
essays were published in Insight and Responsibility (1964) and Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968).

Refused to Sign Loyalty Oath

During the height of McCarthyism, Erikson refused to take a loyalty oath required at
Berkeley and other branches of the University of California. He based his stand on the First
Amendment. As he reflected on that time, he said this was one of his finest moments. He left
the University and returned to the East where he worked with severely disturbed adolescents and
their families.

Vital Involvement in Old Age

Though he retired in 1970, Erikson, wrote, lectured, and conducted research at, among
other places, the Institute of Human Development in Berkeley. In these years, he wrote The Life
Cycle Completed and Vital Involvement in Old Age with Joan Erikson, his wife, and Helen
Kivnik, now a professor of social work at the University of Minnesota. Erikson died at age 91 on
May 12, 1994.

About QRF

Qualitative Family Research was a newsletter of the Qualitative Family Research Network, a
focus group of the National Council on Family Relations, headquartered in Minneapolis, MN,
USA. QFR appeared between 1989 and 1999. Jane Gilgun was the editor from 1990 to 1995.

About the Author

Jane F. Gilgun, Ph.D., LICSW, is a professor, School of Social Work, University of Minnesota,
Twin Cities, USA. See Professor Gilgun’s other articles, books, & children’s stories on
scribd.com, Amazon Kindle, iBooks, and other booksellers for a variety of e-readers and mobile
devices.