Early+Work

=Early Work=

Erikson's initial efforts to set up shop in the U.S. as a child psychoanalyst were at first stymied by his lack of an advanced degree. So he worked for a time as an assistant professor and research assistant at Harvard and Yale. He took some graduate level courses, but ultimately it was his ties with members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that won him professional acceptance. He moved to the San Francisco Bay area, and took a position as a research associate and a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. Soon he was able to start his practice, at last, eventually becoming an important member of the bay area's psychoanalytic community, and even serving as president of the San Francisco Society and Institute in 1950. More significantly, it was during this period at Berkeley that Erikson began his groundbreaking research into childhood and childrearing among the Lakota and the Yurok tribes. Influenced both by the work of cultural anthropologists like [|Franz Boas], [|Ruth Benedict], [|Margaret Mead], and Gregory Bateson, as well as by the theories of [|Sigmund Freud] and his own experience with psychoanalysis, Erikson began formulating his own highly fertile and original viewpoint on child development. [Reference 1]