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Biography
Erling A. Thunberg was born in 1932 in Gothenburg, Sweden, to a Swedish businessman and a Scottish mother, as the youngest of four children.
From an early age, while not neglecting the required educational curriculum, he independently pursued his own educational and intellectual interests. During his adolescence he spent many summers with his older friends and mentors Asta Linden-Buchman, Martin Poser and Otto Viking on the latter's farm in Denmark. By his late teenage years, he had sat in on classes and lectures of some of the great scientists, sociologists and psychologists at universities in northern Europe.
After completing high school he began to travel extensively in Europe. He studied the arts and experienced the culture offered in major cities in Europe, including the music not only of the classicists but also leaders of jazz in clubs and taverns in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Paris. He developed a keen interest in art, particularly art which opened new perspectives of understanding human transformation as well as the interrelation of images that open the mind to new insights.
He hitchhiked through Germany, France and Italy and spent several semesters in Florence studying art history, philosophy and religion and wandered the hills of Tuscany in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi. He continued to read extensively and familiarized himself with the books and thoughts of many fields of human endeavor. He met Robert Assagioli while in Florence, and became very interested in the work of Abraham Maslow and Pitirim Sorokin in the United States. He returned to Sweden intermittently to fulfill his required service in the Swedish Army. He worked various odd jobs - among them as a longshoreman in the Gothenburg harbor, and as a nursing aid in a psychiatric hospital, both for the human experience and to supplement his income.
By the time of his early 20s, his learnings and experiences began to come together in a visionary framework of what he wanted to do, how to go about it and where. The vision, in one word, was about integration - integration of knowledge across disciplines, frameworks of thoughts and cultures. The instrument of this vision later became the International Center for Integrative Studies (ICIS). He chose New York City to be the center's home for its pivotal location in the world and its many unequaled institutions.
In 1957 Erling attended the breakthrough conference on "New Knowledge in Human Values" sponsored by the Research Society for Creative Altruism in Boston, led and coordinated by Pitirim Sorokin, Abraham Maslow and other leading thinkers from the U.S. and other parts of the world. This conference focused on the beginnings of what was later to become humanistic and transpersonal psychology. During a brief stay in New York he met a group of people who had pursued their own human development and had explored various spiritual paths and were deeply concerned about the future of humankind. Together they began to explore the ideas Erling had begun to develop during his years of study and traveling in Europe and the groundwork for the formulations for ICIS began to be laid.
He continued to travel throughout Europe and began to contact and visit many of the seminal thinkers and scientists in Europe, among them Arnold Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, C.P. Snow, C.F.von Weizacker, W. Pauli, and Nils Bohr, to explore his ideas with them. Many of the people he contacted pledged their support and several later became members of the ICIS Board of Sponsors or participants in the ICIS Forum.
From 1962 to 1965 Erling began to spend the greater part of each year in New York with his friends in order to continue the development work of ICIS. The International Center for Integrative Studies was incorporated in 1962 and recognized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in 1963. In 1965 Erling was granted immigration to the United States and moved permanently to New York. Work on the development of ICIS activities, among them the ICIS Forum, continued for the next five years.
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