Name Maria Piers | Role Author | |
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Books The Gift of Play: And Why Young Children Cannot Thrive Without It, Infanticide | ||
Maria Weigl Piers (May 17, 1911 – May 21, 1997) was an American psychologist, social worker, educator and prolific author, whose career was especially devoted to the psycho-social development of children. With Barbara T. Bowman and Lorraine Wallach, Piers founded the Chicago School for Early Childhood Education, later renamed Erikson Institute in recognition of the work of Erik Erikson. Piers served as professor and dean at Erikson Institute, and brought her particular interest and expertise in psychoanalytic theory and practice to the Erikson curriculum.
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Personal life
Piers was born and raised in Vienna, Austria. Her parents were well known Austrian composer, performer and musicologist Karl Weigl and Elsa Pazeller Weigl, who was a vocal performer and was also very actively engaged in anti-Hitler activities in Vienna. Piers attended a Montessori kindergarten as a young child, which she has noted as an early influence that remained with her, throughout her career in child development
In Vienna, Maria met Gerhardt Piers, a friend of her cousin, who was a psychoanalyst by profession. Maria and Gerhardt married in the spring of 1938, and fled to the United States by way of Switzerland later that year, during the Nazi occupation.
Maria died at the age of 86, in 1997. She and Gerhardt, who died in 1979, are survived by a daughter, Margaret, who is a family therapist, and a son, Matthew, who is a civil rights lawyer. At the time of her death, Maria was also grandmother to four grandchildren.
Education and career
Piers received a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1939. She pursued additional study at Northwestern University and at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. In addition to Erikson Institute, her professional history includes work with the Department of Public Welfare in Vienna, social work with the Illinois Society for Mental Health, and teaching at the Chicago Medical School, the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, the University of Chicago, and Loyola University.
Through her early work as a preschool and nursery school teacher, in Vienna, Piers became interested in psychoanalytic thinking. She began her studies in psychoanalysis under Eva Rosenfeld, at Rosenfeld–Burlingham School, and there became acquainted with Erik Erikson and his work. In addition to Erik and Joan Erikson, over the span of her career Piers’ work intersected with that of many notable scholars and practitioners, including René Spitz, Konrad Lorenz, Anna Freud, Jean Piaget and Jane Goodall.
In the midst of the civil rights movement, and the context of school integration in particular, Piers began to recognize the significant gap between theoretical, psychoanalytic knowledge about child development, and the way that parents – especially poor, disadvantaged parents – were raising their children, and the idea for bringing theory and practice together, via Erikson Institute, was born.
Though she wrote widely across the field of child development, in professional and popular publications as well as for television, Piers is especially known for her work in two particular areas – the importance of play in children’s development, and the origins of and motives for infanticide.