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.
Development
1950
introduced by Erik Erikson
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).
In Childhood and Society (1950);The Life Cycle Completed: A Review (1982)
Relations
- 1950 introduced by Erik Erikson
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.
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.
- 1982
The Life Cycle Completed: A Review
A brief late review in which Erikson restates his scheme of the human life cycle. He sets out again the epigenetic order of the eight psychosocial stages, in which each stage has its own time of ascendancy while resting on how the stages before it were met, and names the basic strength that each stage yields. Compared with his earlier statements, the review gives closer attention to old age, the last stage of the cycle, and to the relation between the generations. An extended version, with Joan M. Erikson as co-author, was later published by Norton.
See also
People
References
- Childhood and Society1950Evidence for a relation
- The Life Cycle Completed: A Review1982Evidence for a relation