![\"\"](\"https:\/\/info.hsls.pitt.edu\/updatereport\/files\/2021\/02\/EricksonHandwritingSample.png\")
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Historical manuscripts hand-copied by scribes largely disappeared after the invention of the printing press. With the advent of typewriters and computers, modern handwritten texts are also scarce and soon might disappear altogether. Today\u2019s text editors do not offer the same opportunity to study penmanship, deletions, and notations to glimpse a writer\u2019s personality and writing process. Falk Library\u2019s small manuscript collection aims to preserve some handwritten resources to give researchers another angle from which to study the past.<\/p>\n
Erik Homberger Erikson (1902-1994), a German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst, is famous for his theory of the stages of psychosocial development, and for coining the term \u201cidentity crisis.\u201d He never received a formal degree in medicine, but instead studied art, traveled widely in Europe in order to \u201cfind himself,\u201d and studied psychoanalysis with Anna Freud in Vienna. He moved to the United States in 1933 and began working as a child psychoanalyst. He held various teaching positions at Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley. While working at the Austen Riggs Center in the 1950s, he was also a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n
During his stay in Pittsburgh, Erikson worked with Benjamin Spock and Fred Rogers, and frequented the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic Library. In December 1964, he donated an early version of his noted work, \u201cInsight and Responsibility.\u201d The manuscript was transferred to Falk Library\u2019s Rare Book Room in the late 1990\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\t\t