this period of time as a moratorium, a period during which young people take time out to try to find themselves (Coles, 1970).
He finally began to find his interest when he was invited to teach children at a school in Vienna founded by Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, where he took up the study of psychoanalysis. Shortly after this, he was married and attempted to settle down only to be forced out of Europe as Hitler rose to power. Moving to Boston, he became the city's first child analyst. Not content to settle down, he moved to take a position at Yale, then he moved again to South Dakota in order to study the Sioux Indian culture. He then moved again to San Francisco to resume his clinical practice working with the University of California. He found time while he was here to study yet another Indian culture in California. In studying the parallels between the lives of normal children and the lives of children from different cultural contexts we see that Erikson was looking into areas that Freud had not. In 1949, he came into conflict with the University and moved back to Massachusetts, where he worked and eventually took a professorship at Harvard, where he has been since 1960 (Crain, 1980).
While Freud's writings have focused primarily on the relationship between body zones and the psychosexual stages, Erikson has focused on the interaction of the child and significant others. At each of Freud's stages, Erikson has tried to introduce concepts which lead to an understanding of the general encounter between the child and the social world. Erikson terms the most general basic stage to be Trust vs. Mistrust. The crucial element in this stage is the extent to which the baby develops a sense of trust (Crain, 1980). This sense of trust depends upon the caretakers' predictability as well as their trust in their own ability to provide care. When the baby senses that the parent is consistent and dependable, the baby develop...