Concept
Psychosocial moratorium
A period, granted by society, between childhood and adult commitment, in which a young person may put off binding choices and experiment freely with roles, beliefs and affiliations while working toward an identity. Erikson saw it institutionalised in forms such as apprenticeship, study or military service, and read Luther's years in the monastery as one.
Development
Undated
introduced by Erik Erikson
Erikson described adolescence as a moratorium between childhood and adulthood granted by society, and in Young Man Luther (1958) read Luther's years in the monastery as such a moratorium.
In Childhood and Society (1950);Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968);Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958)
Relations
- introduced by Erik Erikson
Erikson described adolescence as a moratorium between childhood and adulthood granted by society, and in Young Man Luther (1958) read Luther's years in the monastery as such a moratorium.
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.
- 1958
Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History
Erikson's study of the youth of Martin Luther, which its publisher presents as a psychobiography applying his ideas on human development and the identity crisis to the leading figure of the Protestant Reformation. It reads Luther's years of crisis in the monastery as a prolonged identity crisis and as a psychosocial moratorium, a period in which binding adult commitments are put off. It argues that the way Luther resolved this personal crisis became a turning point in the religious history of his age. By reading a leader's inner crisis together with the historical crisis of his time, the book became a founding work of psychohistory and psychobiography.
- 1968
Erikson's fullest statement of his theory of identity. It follows the formation of identity across the life cycle, describes the identity crisis of adolescence and its pathological forms, and develops the notion of the psychosocial moratorium, the delay of adult commitment that society grants the young. In its prologue Erikson recalls that the term identity crisis was first used during the Second World War for veterans at the Mount Zion Veterans' Rehabilitation Clinic in San Francisco who had lost their sense of personal sameness and continuity. Later chapters carry identity into the questions of the 1960s: race, gender and the youth movements of the decade.
See also
People
References
- Childhood and Society1950Evidence for a relation
- Identity: Youth and Crisis1968Evidence for a relation
- Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History1958Evidence for a relation