Concept
Generativity
The concern, characteristic of the seventh of Erikson's stages in middle adulthood, with establishing and guiding the next generation, through parenthood but also through productive and creative work and the care of institutions. Its opposite pole is stagnation, an impoverished absorption in oneself, and the basic strength it yields is care.
Development
1950
introduced by Erik Erikson
Erikson named generativity versus stagnation as the seventh age in Childhood and Society, and made Gandhi's generativity in middle life a central theme of Gandhi's Truth (1969).
In Childhood and Society (1950);Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969)
Relations
- 1950 introduced by Erik Erikson
Erikson named generativity versus stagnation as the seventh age in Childhood and Society, and made Gandhi's generativity in middle life a central theme of Gandhi's Truth (1969).
Works
- 1950
Erikson's first book brings clinical psychoanalysis together with cultural anthropology and history to argue that a child's development cannot be understood apart from the society that raises it: each culture meets the stages of the body and of the ego with its own methods of child training, and through them shapes the kind of adult it needs. The first part sets out the method through case histories, in which a symptom is read at once as a bodily event, an ego event and a social one, and restates Freud's theory of infantile sexuality as a scheme of zones and modes: each body zone carries a characteristic mode of approach (taking in, holding on, letting go, intruding, including) that becomes a modality of social life. The second part draws on Erikson's field work among the Sioux of South Dakota and the Yurok of northern California. It shows how the child training of a buffalo-hunting and of a salmon-fishing people fits their economies and their images of the world, and how the Sioux, cut off from their historical way of life, were left without an identity they could live by. The third part turns to the growth of the ego: the early ego failure of a schizophrenic child, children's play as a way of mastering experience, and the chapter "Eight Ages of Man", which extends the libidinal stages into a sequence of psychosocial crises across the whole life cycle, from basic trust versus mistrust in infancy to ego integrity versus despair in old age. The last part, "Youth and the Evolution of Identity", carries the notion of identity into history: the polarities of American identity, Hitler's imagery of his own childhood read as an appeal to the adolescent rebellion of German youth, and the Soviet film of Maxim Gorky's youth read as a document of an emerging Russian revolutionary identity. Revised and enlarged in 1963, the book brought the psychosocial stages and the identity crisis to a wide readership.
- 1969
Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence
A psychohistorical study of Mohandas Gandhi in middle life, centred on the textile strike at Ahmedabad in 1918. Erikson asks how Gandhi came to move the people of India both spiritually and politically, so that, in the publisher's words, he became the revolutionary innovator of militant nonviolence and India the motherland of large-scale civil disobedience. The book traces how Gandhi's generativity, the concern of middle life with what one establishes and guides for those who come after, and his method of nonviolent resistance grew out of his personal history and out of the historical situation of his time. With Young Man Luther it set the pattern of psychohistory. It received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1970.
See also
People
References
- Childhood and Society1950Evidence for a relation
- Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence1969Evidence for a relation