The writing and ideas of Erik Erikson have had a remarkably lasting influence on our culture. Erikson's fascination with India and with Gandhi earned him the Pulitzer Prize for his book Gandhi's Truth and foreshadowed the contemporary West's growing interest in Eastern thought. His students at Harvard in the 1960s have gone on to great prominence - Carol Gilligan, Robert Coles, Mary Catherine Bateson, and Howard Gardner to name a few.

Trained in Vienna by Sigmund and Anna Freud, Erikson came to depart from psychoanalytic orthodoxy in deeply innovative ways - insisting that social circumstances were no less important than the inner psyche in determining human personality.