Joan Erikson Is Dead at 95; Shaped Thought on Life Cycles (Published 1997)

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Joan Mowat Erikson, who helped reshape the prevailing psychological view of human development through a six-decade, all-senses collaboration with her husband, Erik Erikson, and still found time to pursue her own interests in arts and crafts, education and dance, died on Sunday at a nursing home in Brewster, Mass. She was 95.

Officially, it was Mr. Erikson who developed the theory that one's sense of identity progresses through eight distinct life cycles marked by the resolution of successive emotional conflicts.

But as Mr. Erikson made repeatedly clear, neither the theory nor its images would have been possible had it not been for the tall, striking woman who waltzed into his arms at a masked ball in Vienna in 1928 and rarely left his side until the day he died in 1994 at age 91.

Joan, who was born in Canada and whose father was an Anglican priest, had graduated from Barnard College, obtained a master's degree from Columbia's Teachers College, completed the course work for a doctorate and gone to Vienna to do research for a dissertation on dance.

Erik, the German-born son of Danish parents, was a restless, itinerant painter of children's portraits who had been lured to Vienna by a friend to become a glorified baby-sitter and had stayed, first to help Anna Freud and others create a progressive school and later to study with her father, Sigmund Freud.

Mr. Erikson was so smitten with the woman he called ''die Schone'' (German for ''the beauty'') that he gave up his aimless ways. She was so taken with him that she abandoned her dissertation and took a job at the school.