Kai T. Erikson

Kai Theodor Erikson (born February 12, 1931)

Erikson was born in Vienna, the son of Joan Erikson (née Serson), a Canadian-born artist, dancer, and writer, and Erik Erikson, a German-born famed psychologist and sociologist.^[4] His maternal grandfather was an Episcopalian minister,^[5] and Erikson was raised a Protestant.^[6] Erikson graduated from The Putney School in Vermont, Reed College in Oregon and earned a PhD at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1959 where he held a joint appointment at the School of Medicine and in the Department of Sociology. There he met his future wife Joanna Slivka, who became Joanna Erikson.^[7]

In 1963 he moved to

H. Lawrence Ross described the book as "fascinating and superbly written". The sociological premise explored is from Émile Durkheim: "a function of deviance is to define the normative boundaries of the group." He notes that it is "a remarkable exception to the well-known tendency of sociological research to focus on the here and now." On the statistical analysis Ross comments: "the reasons to expect constancy of deviance over time, such as the limited capacity of the control system, would seem to predict stability of convictions as much as stability of offenders, and in consequence the analysis here seems unsatisfactory.”^[8]

Aftermaths of disasters

Erikson subsequently studied a number of disasters in the context of their sociological implications, including the nuclear fallout in the