Concept
Psychosocial development
Erik Erikson's account of personality development as a sequence of eight stages spanning the whole life cycle, each defined by a crisis between two opposed tendencies: basic trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, identity versus identity confusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and integrity versus despair. Building on Freud's libidinal stages, it places the growing ego within the demands and supports of family, society and history, and holds, by an epigenetic principle, that each stage has its own time of ascendancy while depending on how those before it were resolved.
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- Introduced by
- Erik Erikson
- Key works
- 2
- Related
- Psychosexual development
introduced by
- Erik Erikson 1950 Erikson set out the eight stages in the chapter "Eight Ages of Man" of Childhood and Society (1950), and restated the scheme and its epigenetic principle late in life in The Life Cycle Completed (1982).
derives from
- Psychosexual development Erikson's first four ages correspond to Freud's oral, anal, phallic and latency phases; Childhood and Society starts from Freud's zones and modes and adds to each the social crisis it brings.