Book
Childhood and Society
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.
Main ideas
- Development is psychosocial: the growth of the ego cannot be separated from its social and historical setting, and every society meets the child's bodily stages with its own methods of child training, suited to its economy and its image of the world.
- A case history must be read on three interlocking levels, the organism, the ego and society, none of which explains a symptom on its own.
- Freud's libidinal stages are restated as zones and modes: each body zone carries a mode of approach, such as taking in, holding on, letting go or intruding, which becomes a modality of social behaviour.
- Among the Sioux and the Yurok, child training fits the economy and world image of a hunting and a fishing people; a people cut off from its historical way of life, like the Sioux, hands its children an identity without a usable future.
- Play is the child's way of mastering experience by creating model situations, and the child's play constructions reveal the synthesizing work of the ego.
- The life cycle runs through eight ages, each posing a crisis between two opposed outcomes: basic trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, identity versus role confusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and ego integrity versus despair.
- The task of adolescence is identity: an inner sense of sameness and continuity that matches the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for others; its failure is role confusion.
- Nations too have identities that their leaders and myths work on: Erikson reads the polarities of American identity, Hitler's appeal to German adolescent rebellion and the film of Gorky's youth as expressions of national identities in crisis.
What it shows
- 1950
Erik Erikson introduced Psychosocial development
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).
- 1950
Erik Erikson introduced Identity crisis
Erikson coined the term during the Second World War for veterans at the Mount Zion Veterans' Rehabilitation Clinic in San Francisco who had lost their sense of sameness and continuity; he described the crisis as the fifth age in Childhood and Society and recalled the term's origin in the prologue to Identity: Youth and Crisis.
- 1950
Erik Erikson introduced Basic trust
Basic trust versus basic mistrust is the first of the eight ages in Childhood and Society, where Erikson treats the infant's trust as the cornerstone of a healthy personality.
- 1950
Erik Erikson introduced Generativity
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).
Erik Erikson introduced Psychosocial moratorium
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.
Show all 8 Show fewer
Sigmund Freud influenced Erik Erikson
Erikson built his eight ages on Freud's theory of libidinal stages, widening it from the body zones to the social tasks of each period of life.
Psychosocial development 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.
Identity diffusion opposes Ego identity
In Erikson's scheme identity diffusion is the negative pole of the adolescent crisis whose positive outcome is ego identity.
Gallery
Cover of the W. W. Norton paperback edition of Childhood and Society (1993)