ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA Erikson, Erik H. b. June 15, 1902, Frankfurt am Main, Ger. d. May 12, 1994, Harwich, Mass., U.S. in full ERIK HOMBURGER ERIKSON, German-born American psychoanalyst whose writings on social psychology, individual identity, and the interactions of psychology with history, politics, and culture influenced professional approaches to psychosocial problems and attracted much popular interest. As a young man, Erikson attended art school and traveled around Europe. In 1927, when he was invited by the psychoanalyst Anna Freud to teach art, history, and geography at a small private school in Vienna, he entered psychoanalysis with her and underwent training to become a psychoanalyst himself. He became interested in the treatment of children and published his first paper in 1930, before completing psychoanalytic training and being elected to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1933. The same year, he emigrated to the United States, where he practiced child psychoanalysis in Boston and joined the faculty of the Harvard Medical School. He became interested in studying the way the ego, or consciousness, operates creatively in sane, well-ordered individuals. Erikson left Harvard in 1936 to join the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. Two years later he began his first studies of cultural influences on psychological development, working with Sioux Indian children at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. These studies, and later work with the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber among the Yurok Indians of northern California, eventually contributed to Erikson's theory that all societies develop institutions to accommodate personality development but that the typical solutions to similar problems arrived at by different societies are different. Erikson moved his clinical practice to San Francisco in 1939 and became professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942. During the 1940s he produced the essays that were collected in Childhood and Society (1950), the first major exposition of his views on psychosocial development. The evocative work was edited by his wife, Joan Serson Erikson. Erikson conceived eight stages of development, each confronting the individual with its own psychosocial demands, that continued into old age. Personality development, according to Erikson, takes place through a series of crises that must be overcome and internalized by the individual in preparation for the next developmental stage. Refusing to sign a loyalty oath required by the University of California in 1950, Erikson resigned his post and that year joined the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass. He then returned to Harvard as a lecturer and professor (1960-70) and professor emeritus (from 1970 until his death). In Young Man Luther (1958), Erikson combined his interest in history and psychoanalytic theory to examine how Martin Luther was able to break with the existing religious establishment to create a new way of looking at the world. Gandhi's Truth on the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (1969) also was a psychohistory. In the 1970s Erikson examined modern ethical and political problems, presenting his views in a collection of essays, Life History and the Historical Moment (1975), which links psychoanalysis to history, political science, philosophy, and theology. His later works include The Life Cycle Completed: A Review (1982) and Vital Involvement in Old Age (1986), written with his wife and Helen Q. Kivnik. A collection of papers, A Way of Looking at Things, edited by Stephen Schlein, appeared in 1987. ------------------------ Chapter 6 Erik H. Erikson Outline 1. Erik Erikson: A New Creative Ego -A Psycho-social Theory of Development -Epigenesis -Psychosexual Components -Psychosocial Crises 2. Trust vs. Mistrust -Basic Trust -Basic Mistrust -Hope 3. Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt -Autonomy -Shame and Doubt -Will 4. Initiative vs. Guilt -Initiative -Guilt -Purpose 5. Industry vs. Inferiority -Industry -Inferiority -Competence 6. Identity vs. Identity Confusion -Identity Confusion -Negative Identity -Psychosocial Moratorium -Fidelity 7. Intimacy vs. Isolation -Intimacy -Isolation -Love 8. Generativity vs. Stagnation -Generativity -Stagnation -Care 9. Integrity vs. Despair -Integrity -Despair -Wisdom 10. Research Emphases and Methods -Life History vs. Case History -Play -Further Research on Identity Status: Identity Achievement Moratorium Foreclosure Identity Diffusion 11. Evaluation Terms 1. narcissism - a form of self encapsulation in which an individual experiences as real only that which exists within him or herself. 2. psychosocial stages - a series of developmental stages proposed by Erikson through which all people pass. He emphasized the social dimension of personality. 3. life crisis - a crucial period in which the individual faces a decisive turn. 4. trust versus mistrust - it corresponds to Freud's oral stage, in which infants face the task of trusting the world. 5. autonomy versus shame and doubt - it corresponds to Freud's anal stage, in which the child faces the task of developing control over his or her body and bodily functions. 6. initiative versus guilt - it corresponds to Freud's phallic stage, in which children face the task of directing their curiosity and activity toward specific goals and achievement. 7. industry versus inferiority - it corresponds to Freud's latency period, in which children face the task of learning and mastering the technology of their culture. 8. ego identity versus role confusion - Erikson's psychosocial stage of adolescence in which one faces the task of developing a self image. 9. identity crisis - a transitory failure to develop a self image or identity. 10. negative identity - an identity opposed to the dominant values of one's culture. 11. intimacy versus isolation- Erikson's psychosocial stage of young adulthood in which one faces the task of establishing a close, deep and meaningful genital relationship with another person. 12. generativity versus stagnation - Erikson's psychosocial stage of the middle years, in which one faces the dilemma of being productive and creative in life. 13. ego integrity versus despair - Erikson's psychosocial stage of maturity that entails the task of being able to reflect on one's life with satisfaction. 14. psychohistory - the combined use of psychoanalysis and historical methods to study individuals and groups. SUMMARY 1. Sigmund Freud modified and reshaped his theories throughout his life; his followers have continued this process and have applied Freudian theory in an increasingly broad range of situations. 2. The development of eao psychology brought about a major change in psychoanalytic thinking. After Freud himself began to devote more attention to the ego, others began to undertake serious study of the ego and its functions, emphasizing the ego's adaptive and creative aspects. ERIK ERIKSON 1. The ego develops in response to both inner forces and the social environment. It is adaptive and creative, and it strives actively to help the person cope successfully with his or her world. 2. The psychosocial theory of development outlines a life cycle of eight stages, in each of which a positive eao cruality (such as basic trust) must outweigh a negative one (such as basic mistrust) to permit the development of a virtue (such as hoipe). 3. By the principle of epigenesis, each new ego quality evolves at a different stage but is present in a "ground plan" at birth. And each ego quality and virtue depends on the development of each quality and virtue that has preceded it. (Epigenetic means "upon emergence," or unfolding according to an innate schedule. Both the positive and negative characteristics of any stage (e.g., basic trust and mistrust) are present to some degree in every personality. A preponderance of the former denotes healthy adjustment, and results in the emergence of the corresponding ego quality. A favorable or unfavorable resolution of each crisis is by no means permanent, but remains subject to future benign and pathogenic conditions. However, a given ego quality is unlikely to appear unless the preceding stages have developed satisfactorily.) 4. Although in each stage a balance is struck between positive and negative ego qualities, the individual continues to confront each of the conflicts described repeatedly throughout his or her life cycle. 5. Each stage is also characterized by a ritualization (such as the mother-baby interaction) that prepares the way for an adult ritual (such as the encounter with another person). But ritualization may be distorted into a ritualism (such as blind worship of another). 6. In support of his psychosocial theory, Erikson has undertaken research activities. Using -Dlav situations that evolved out of his therapeutic work with children, he has observed numbers of young people. And he has created the psychohistory, the examination of the life of a famous figure in history. He has interpreted all this research as supporting his theory, and his psychohistory studies have served to illustrate it. 7. Researchers have elaborated Erikson's conception of identity formation, proposing four categories of identity status: identity achievement, moratorium, foreclosure, and identity diffusion. Research findings have given some support to the validity of these categories. 8. Erikson had been criticized for neglecting the negative aspects of personality functioning, for having sacrificed some important aspects of Freudian theory, such as the id and the unconscious, and for failing to support his hypotheses with controlled experimentation. On the other hand, many psychologists greatly prefer Erikson's psychosocial stages to Freud's psychosexual ones. And, most important, Erikson's theory had provided a rich source of hypotheses for study; some of his conceptions are finding support in the research of a number of investigators. "Erik Erikson: Psychoanalyst Who Reshaped Views of Human Growth" (The-New York Times, Obituaries, Friday, May 13, 1994). Erik H. Erikson, the psychoanalyst who profoundly reshaped views of human development, died yesterday at the Rosewood Manor Nursing Home in Harwich, Mass. He was 91. He had a brief illness said his daughter, Sue Erikson Bloland of Manhattan. A friend and disciple of Sigmund Freud, Mr. Erikson was a thinker whose ideas had effects far beyond psychoanalysis, shaping the emerging fields of child development and life-span studies and researching into the humanities. He was best known for the theory that each stage of life, from infancy and early-childhood on, is associated with specific psychological struggle that contributes to a major aspect of personality. That represented a quantum leap in Freudian thought, suggesting that the ego and the sense of identity are shaped over the entire life span and experiences later in life might help heal the hurts of early childhood. Mr. Erikson's influence, compounded by clinical studies of children, a teaching post at Harvard University, popular lectures and best selling books on Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther, pervaded many layers of society, from education to medicine to law to biography to psychiatry to low brow culture. His popular recognition reached a peak in the 70's, particularly because of his identification of the "identity crisis" -- he coined the term -- but his scholarly contributions have assured him a place of eminence in many disciplines. The term "psychobiography," which he did not originate, was also associated with his name. His most significant contribution, however, was the concept of the malleable ego in adults, a departure from the traditional theories of an ego fixed early in life and persisting to its end. External Forces and Personality A crucial element in the theory of successive changes in personality and, hence, ego modification was that the dynamics of society in which a person lived determined the extent of the resolution of the changes. By placing the individual firmly in a societal matrix, Mr. Erikson could suggest the degree to which political, economic, and social systems, all exterior forces mold a person's interior life. In that manner Mr. Erikson sought a union between psychoanalysis and the social sciences. As a pioneer in the study of the life cycle, he considered that it consisted of eight crucial stages. The eight stages are infancy, the oral sensory stage, in which the emotional conflict is between basic trust and mistrust; muscular-anal, in which autonomy conflicts with shame and doubt; the locomotor-genital,where the conflict lies between initiative and guilt; latency, in which the positive component is industry and the negative is inferiority; adolescence, where the identity crisis or role confusion normally occurs; young adulthood, in which intimacy vies with isolation; adulthood, in which the crisis poles are generativity and stagnation and maturity or old age when despair threatens ego integrity. In some of his last work, in his 80's, Mr. Erikson worked with his wife, Joan, who lent him an editorial hand throughout his career, to develop a more detailed description of just what the lessons of each stage impart to wisdom in old age. In the final phase of life, the Eriksons proposed, wisdom is achieved to the degree that each earlier phase had positive revolutions. In infancy, for example, the issue is trust versus fearfulness. In old age that becomes an appreciation of interdependence. The snuggle in early childhood between a sense of will and mastery of one's body, on the one hand, and a shame and doubt on the other, becomes in old age, if successfully resolved, an acceptance of the inevitable deterioration of the body. All the crises, including the last, have positive and negative solutions, Mr. Erikson theorized, mediated strongly by milieu and other cultural and societal factors. But whatever the solution, at each stage the crisis has to be resolved if the person is to be unharmed by crippling dread or neurosis. The role of society, and even the force of contemporary history, applies directly, at least from adolescence onward. Criticism from the Freudians Mr. Erikson's theories were not wholly accepted by the Freudians. The orthodox considered him a heretic, and he thought that Anna Freud, with which he once had a special relationship, was unhappy over his departures from the Freudian canon. Other sharpshooters were in the academic community. Many social scientists thought that Mr. Erikson was ill grounded in their fields. Others doubted his scholarly abilities, partly on the grounds that his sole diploma was earned in high school. But Mr. Erikson was serene, believing his critics did not deal with the substance of his findings and assumptions. He felt compensated, he said, by the attention paid by younger people without credal allegiances. The evolution of his ideas emerged to 'a definable extent from his life and from a long habit of trusting his artistic eye and his belief in the efficacy of his institution. Mr. Erikson was born on June 15, 1902 in Frankfurt, Germany, of Danish parents. The common story was that his mother and father had separated before his birth, but the closely guarded fact was that he was his mother's child from an extramarital union. He never saw his birth father or his mother's first husband. When he was three his mother was married to his pediatrician, Dr. Theodore Homburger, and throughout his youth he was known as Erik Homburger. He did not learn the circumstances of his parentage until his teenage years, "and it was a secret my mother and I shared." To add to the confusion, his adoptive father was Jewish and his mother's heritage was Lutheran. He was reared as a Jew, because his mother and her new husband agreed to treat him as their son. He was also led to think of himself as a German, and his Anti-Semantic schoolmates taunted him, while at the synagogue his Jewish friends rejected him because of his strongly Nordic features. As a consequence of compounded identity confusions, he said he developed a 'morbid sensitivity" and often escaped into a fantasy world. After graduating from high school in Karlsruhe, he became an itinerant Bohemian, scratching out a living by sketching children. In the process he read electrically on his own, mostly about art and history. Focus Turned to Children Then, in 1927, he got word from Peter Blos, a classmate and "my oldest friend," who was a child analyst, that there might be a summer job in Vienna as a tutor companion to the four children of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, an American studying with Freud. Mr. Erikson went for the summer and remained to create, with Mr. Blos and Anna Freud, a progressive school in which the students were taught as individuals. Mr. Erikson proved a gifted teacher, with a "knack" as he put it, for empathy with children. Miss Freud, who was pioneering the application of her father's theory to children, singled him out as a potential child analyst and invited him to be her patient. He had, meantime, met Freud at a family picnic and gone mushroom hunting with him. Being analyzed by a woman presented problems for Mr. Erikson, but the process, which lasted over three years, proved beneficial, he said. "Psychoanalysis was not so formal then," he said. "I paid Miss Freud $7.00 a month, and we met almost every day. My analysis which gave me self-awareness, led me not to fear being myself. We didn't use all those pseudoscientific terms then -defense mechanism and the like -- so the process of self-awareness, painful at the time, emerged in a liberating atmosphere." In 1930 Mr. Erikson married Joan Serson, a dancer and artist, many of whose intellectual interests coincided with his. The marriage helped stabilize Mr. Erikson and turn him further toward child analyst as a career. With his analysis complete by 1933 and his formal training in psychoanalysis also finished, Mr. Erikson left Vienna for the United States. He had a presentment, he said, of the Nazi terror that was about to descend on Europe, and he was restive about developments in Freudianism, in which theories were being hardened into beliefs." and the whole thing was becoming credal. On the boat he learned 800 words of basic English with the aid of George F. Kennan, the diplomat, so that when he arrived in Boston he could make his way around. Child analysis was in its infancy here, so Mr. Erikson had little difficulty in acquiring patients and an appointment at the Harvard medical School. Mr. Erikson was urged to become more academically acceptable by earning a Ph.D. "I tried for a bit," he recalled, "and then I said the hell with it." He felt that he could learn more from children. "You see a child play," he said, "and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what is wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever's in them rises to the surface in free play." How Society Molds Childhoods Mr. Erikson also worked at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, coming into contact with Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Benedict, the anthropologists, and Henry Murray and Kurt Lewin, the psychologists. He then went to Yale as a full time researcher at the Institute of Human Relations and, eventually, as a professor at the medical school. The development of his thought, he said, was from the case history to life history to social and cultural factors. In the pursuit of the social and cultural he left Yale in 1938 to study the early childhood training of the Sioux on a reservation in South Dakota. That was the start of a life concern to demonstrate how the universal events of childhood were affected and molded by society. Later he also studied the Yurok, salmon fishing Indians in Northern California. He found a marked difference between Sioux children, reared on tales of game hunting, and the more restrictive childhood of the Yurok, which prepared them for an arduous way of life. In the war years Mr. Erikson studied scores of normal children on the West Coast in an effort to explore psychodynamics through experimental play. Out of that came his initial attempt to relate the Freudian stage theory of infantile sexuality to emergent social capacities and needs in a particular milieu. His proposal that psychoanalysis ought to be a way for understanding "the vicissitudes of normal life" was reinforced by a postwar treatment of emotionally disturbed veterans. Mr. Erikson was impressed by finding that his patients were bewildered and anxious, but not mentally ill. They were, he wrote, mostly normal men undergoing the normal crisis of adjustment to postwar society. Mr. Erikson elaborated in a paper entitled "Ego Development and Historical Chance," in which he argued that racism and joblessness could effect the mind at the deepest layers of the unconscious and that social and historical factors contributed heavily to an ego's strength or weakness. Widespread Effects from Popular Book Mr. Erikson's reputation was limited, however, until the publication in 1950 of "Childhood and Society," which laid out his theories on the stage development of life. The book, which attained a popular audience and established Mr. Erikson as a genitive thinker, had profound effects on many educators, psychologists and many other specialists who had accepted Freud's views of childhood. The book also spurred younger analysts to appreciate cultural anthropology and social psychology. Mr. Erikson's concepts, moreover, opened a door to the idea that adults, despite poor childhoods, could compensate for their deprivations. The mold of the first five years of life was not hard and fast. Mr. Erikson's book, which has been a steady seller over the years in many languages, was one of the anchors of his fame. Two others were "Gandhi's Truth" (1969) and "Young Man Luther" (1958) both extensive psychobiographies in which men of great gifts discover themselves in their roles in relation to their times in adulthood. "Gandhils Truth" won the Pulitzer prize and a National Book Award. Before writing those books Mr. Erikson became a cause celebre by leaving the University of California in 1950 rather than sign a loyalty oath. Not a Communist, Mr. Erikson spurned the oath on first amendment grounds and created a considerable hubbub. He stood fast, and he said later that his attitude was among his finest moments. In the McCarthy era Mr. Erikson was a senior staff member at the Austin Riqqs Center in Stockbridge, Mass., where he treated severely disturbed young people from well off families. As a balance, he commuted biweekly to Pittsburgh to work with disturbed youngsters from poor families, partly in collaboration with Dr. Benjamin Spock. He also wrote for journals, chiefly about identity, which he defined as a basic confidence in one's inner continuity amid change. A sense of adult identity, he said at one point, "denotes certain comprehensive gains that the individual must have derived from all his preadult experiences." The crisis associated with an emergent identity, he suggested, is a normal one and may be accompanied by intense neurotic suffering. In some cases the crisis may be prolonged, especially for creative people. That thinking was applied in Mr. Erikson's study of Luther, in which he focused on Luther's "fit" in a monastery choir as an identity crisis and tried to show how Luther had freed himself from an authoritarian father and the constrictions of Roman Catholicism. Widely praised, the book stirred discussions on the insights of psychobiography as well as its limitations. Critics suggested that for all the light that Mr. Erikson had generated, he had underestimated the cumulative historical forces that produced the Reformation. In the 1960's Mr. Erikson returned to Harvard as professor of Human Development. He also conducted behavioral research, lectured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published essays in journals, later put into book form. The books were "Insight and Responsibility" (1964) and "Identity: Youth and Crisis" (1968). Hopefulness Inspired by Gandhi His busy life included long sojourns in India, where he became fascinated by the life of Gandhi and wrote, in "Gandhils Truth," about the acetic's first use of fasting, in 1918, to win a textile strike. The book tried to show the virtues of nonviolent civil disobedience and centered on Gandhi's middle life, when he became a national leader and symbol for the struggle of independence. Mr. Erikson was energized by his study of Gandhi and was led to believe in the possibility of "quite different images of youth and young adulthood" than those prevailing. He was full of hope that "new models of fraternal behavior may come to replace those images of comradeship and courage that have been tied in the past to military service and probably have contributed to a glorification to a kind of warfare doomed to be obsolete in our time." He was optimistic that new models of behavior "would make it possible for adults to contribute true knowledge and genuine experience without assuming an authoritative stance beyond their actual competence and genuine inner authority." He was especially wary of what he saw as a prevailing irrationality among people, young and old, who scorned measured progress as they took direct action to pursue their goals. In the years since his formal retirement in 1970, Mr. Erikson worked on essays, wrote books, lectured and divided his time between California and Cape Cod. In 1987 he and his wife moved from Martin County, California to Cambridge, Massachusetts because of the founding of the Erik Erikson Center there for scholars and clinicians. The center is affiliated with Cambridge hospital, part of the Harvard Medical School. His last two books, "The Life Cycle Completed" in 1982 and "Vital Involvement in Old Age," written with his wife and Helen Kivnick in 1986, articulated his ideas on the last stage of life. "A Way of Looking at Things," a collection of his papers edited by Dr. Stephen Schlein, was published in 1987. In addition to his daughter and his wife, of Harwich, surviving are two sons, Kai of New Haven and Jon of Los Osos, California; two sisters, Ruth Hirsch of Manhattan and Ellen Katz of Haifa, Israel, and three grandchildren. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ERIK ERIKSON 1902 - 1994 Dr. C. George Boeree -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Among the Oglala Dakota (or Sioux), it was the tradition for an adolescent boy to go off on his own, weaponless and wearing nothing but a loincloth and mocassins, on a dream quest. Hungry, thirsty, and bone-tired, the boy would expect to have a dream on the fourth day which would reveal to him his life's path. Returning home, he would relate his dream to the tribal elders, who would interpret it according to ancient practice. And his dream would tell him whether he was destined to be a good hunter, or a great warrior, or expert at the art of horse-stealing, or perhaps to become specialized in the making of weapons, or a spiritual leader, priest, or medicine man. In some cases, the dream would lead him into the realm of controlled deviations among the Oglala. A dream involving the thunderbird might lead a boy to go through a period of time as a heyoka, which involved acting like a clown or a crazy man. Or a vision of the moon or a white buffalo could lead one to a life as a berdache, a man who dresses and behaves as if he were a woman. In any case, the number of roles one could play in life was extremely limited for men, and even more so for women. Most people were generalists; very few could afford to be specialists. And you learned these roles by simply being around the other people in your family and community. You learned them by living. By the time the Oglala Dakota were visited by Erik Erikson, things had changed quite a bit. They had been herded onto a large but barren reservation through a series of wars and unhappy treaties. The main source of food, clothing, shelter, and just about everything else -- the buffalo -- had long since been hunted into near-extinction. Worst of all, the patterns of their lives had been taken from them, not by white soldiers, but by the quiet efforts of government bureaucrats to turn the Dakota into Americans! Children were made to stay at boarding schools much of the year, in the sincere belief that civilization and prosperity comes with education. At boarding schools they learned many things that contradicted what they learned at home: They were taught white standards of cleanliness and beauty, some of which contradicted Dakota standards of modesty. They were taught to compete, which contradicted Dakota traditions of egalitarianism. They were told to speak up, when their upbringing told them to be still. In other words, their white teachers found them quite impossible to work with, and their parents found them quite corrupted by an alien culture. As time went by, their original culture disappeared, but the new culture didn't provide the necessary substitutions. There were no more dream quests, but then what roles were there left for adolescents to dream themselves into? Erikson was moved by the difficulties faced by the Dakota childen and adolescents he talked to and observed. But growing up and finding one's place in the world isn't easy for many other Americans, either. African-Americans struggle to piece together an identity out of forgotten African roots, the culture of powerlessness and poverty, and the culture of the surrounding white majority. Asian-Americans are similarly stretched between Asian and American traditions. Rural Americans find that the cultures of childhood won't cut it in the larger society. And the great majority of European-Americans have, in fact, little left of their own cultural identities other than wearing green on St. Patrick's Day or a recipe for marinara sauce from grandma! American culture, because it is everybody's, is in some senses nobody's. Like native Americans, other Americans have also lost many of the rituals that once guided us through life. At what point are you an adult? When you go through puberty? Have your confirmation or bar mitzvah? Your first sexual experience? Sweet sixteen party? Your learner's permit? Your driver's license? High school graduation? Voting in your first election? First job? Legal drinking age? College graduation? When exactly is it that everyone treats you like an adult? Consider some of the contradictions: You may be old enough to be entrusted with a two-ton hunk of speeding metal, yet not be allowed to vote; You may be old enough to die for your country in war, yet not be permitted to order a beer; As a college student, you may be trusted with thousands of dollars of student loans, yet not be permitted to choose your own classes. In traditional societies (even our own only 50 or 100 years ago), a young man or woman looked up to his or her parents, relations, neighbors, and teachers. They were decent, hard-working people (most of them) and we wanted to be just like them. Unfortunately, most children today look to the mass media, especially T.V., for role models. It is easy to understand why: The people on T.V. are prettier, richer, smarter, wittier, healthier, and happier than anybody in our own neighborhoods! Unfortunately, they aren't real. I'm always astounded at how many new college students are quickly disappointed to discover that their chosen field actually requires a lot of work and study. It doesn't on T.V. Later, many people are equally surprised that the jobs they worked so hard to get aren't as creative and glorious and fulfilling as they expected. Again, that isn't how it is on T.V. It shouldn't surprise us that so many young people look to the short-cuts that crime seems to offer, or the fantasy life that drugs promise. Some of you may see this as an exaggeration or a stereotype of modern adolescence. I certainly hope that your passage from childhood to adulthood was a smooth one. But a lot of people -- myself and Erikson included -- could have used a dream quest. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Biography Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 15, 1902. There is a little mystery about his heritage: His biological father was an unnamed Danish man who abandoned Erik's mother before he was born. His mother, Karla Abrahamsen, was a young Jewish woman who raised him alone for the first three years of his life. She then married Dr. Theodor Homberger, who was Erik's pediatrician, and moved to Karlsruhe in southern Germany. We cannot pass over this little piece of biography without some comment: The development of identity seems to have been one of his greatest concerns in Erikson's own life as well as in his theory. During his childhood, and his early adulthood, he was Erik Homberger, and his parents kept the details of his birth a secret. So here he was, a tall, blond, blue-eyed boy who was also Jewish. At temple school, the kids teased him for being Nordic; at grammar school, they teased him for being Jewish. After graduating high school, Erik focussed on becoming an artist. When not taking art classes, he wandered around Europe, visiting museums and sleeping under bridges. He was living the life of the carefree rebel, long before it became "the thing to do." When he was 25, his friend Peter Blos -- a fellow artist and, later, psychoanalyst -- suggested he apply for a teaching position at an experimental school for American students run by Dorothy Burlingham, a friend of Anna Freud. Besides teaching art, he gathered a certificate in Montessori education and one from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He was psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud herself. While there, he also met Joan Serson, a Canadian dance teacher at the school. They went on the have three children, one of whom became a sociologist himself. With the Nazis coming into power, they left Vienna, first for Copenhagen, then to Boston. Erikson was offered a position at the Harvard Medical School and practiced child psychoanalysis privately. During this time, he met psychologists like Henry Murray and Kurt Lewin, and anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. I think it can be safely said that these anthropologists had nearly as great an effect on Erikson as Sigmund and Anna Freud! He later taught at Yale, and later still at the University of California at Berkeley. It was during this period of time that he did his famous studies of modern life among the Dakota and the Yurok. When he became an American citizen, he officially changed his name to Erik Erikson. No-one seems to know where he got the name! In 1950, he wrote Childhood and Society, which contained summaries of his studies among the native Americans, analyses of Maxim Gorkiy and Adolph Hitler, a discussion of the "American personality," and the basic outline of his version of Freudian theory. These themes -- the influence of culture on personality and the analysis of historical figures -- were repeated in other works, one of which, Gandhi's Truth, won him the Pulitzer Prize and the national Book Award. In 1950, during Senator Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror, Erikson left Berkeley when professors there were asked to sign "loyalty oaths." He spent ten years working and teaching at a clinic in Massachussets, and ten years more back at Harvard. Since retiring in 1970, he wrote and did research with his wife. He died in 1994. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Theory Erikson is a Freudian ego-psychologist. This means that he accepts Freud's ideas as basically correct, including the more debatable ideas such as the Oedipal complex, and accepts as well the ideas about the ego that were added by other Freudian loyalists such as Heinz Hartmann and, of, course, Anna Freud. However, Erikson is much more society and culture-oriented than most Freudians, as you might expect from someone with his anthropological interests, and he often pushes the instincts and the unconscious practically out of the picture. Perhaps because of this, Erikson is popular among Freudians and non-Freudians alike! The epigenetic principle He is most famous for his work in refining and expanding Freud's theory of stages. Development, he says, functions by the epigenetic principle. This principle says that we develop through a predetermined unfolding of our personalities in eight stages. Our progress through each stage is in part determined by our success, or lack of success, in all the previous stages. A little like the unfolding of a rose bud, each petal opens up at a certain time, in a certain order, which nature, through its genetics, has determined. If we interfere in the natural order of development by pulling a petal forward prematurely or out of order, we ruin the development of the entire flower. Each stage involves certain developmental tasks that are psychosocial in nature. Although he follows Freudian tradition by calling them crises, they are more drawn out and less specific than that term implies. The child in grammar school, for example, has to learn to be industrious during that period of his or her life, and that industriousness is learned through the complex social interactions of school and family. The various tasks are referred to by two terms. The infant's task, for example, is called "trust-mistrust." At first, it might seem obvious that the infant must learn trust and not mistrust. But Erikson made it clear that there it is a balance we must learn: Certainly, we need to learn mostly trust; but we also need to learn a little mistrust, so as not to grow up to become gullible fools! Each stage has a certain optimal time as well. It is no use trying to rush children into adulthood, as is so common among people who are obsessed with success. Neither is it possible to slow the pace or to try to protect our children from the demands of life. There is a time for each task. If a stage is managed well, we carry away a certain virtue or psychosocial strength which will help us through the rest of the stages of our lives. On the other hand, if we don't do so well, we may develop maladaptations and malignancies, as well as endanger all our future development. A malignancy is the worse of the two, and involves too little of the positive and too much of the negative aspect of the task, such as a person who can't trust others. A maladaptation is not quite as bad and involves too much of the positive and too little of the negative, such as a person who trusts too much. Children and adults Perhaps Erikson's greatest innovation was to postulate not five stages, as Freud had done, but eight. Erikson elaborated Freud's genital stage into adolescence plus three stages of adulthood. We certainly don't stop developing -- especially psychologically -- after our twelfth or thirteenth birthdays; It seems only right to extend any theory of stages to cover later development! Erikson also had some things to say about the interaction of generations, which he called mutuality. Freud had made it abundantly clear that a child's parents influence his or her development dramatically. Erikson pointed out that children influence their parents' development as well. The arrival of children, for example, into a couple's life, changes that life considerably, and moves the new parents along their developmental paths. It is even appropriate to add a third (and in some cases, a fourth) generation to the picture: Many of us have been influenced by our grandparents, and they by us. A particularly clear example of mutuality can be seen in the problems of the teenage mother. Although the mother and her child may have a fine life together, often the mother is still involved in the tasks of adolescence, that is, in finding out who she is and how she fits into the larger society. The relationship she has or had with the child's father may have been immature on one or both sides, and if they don't marry, she will have to deal with the problems of finding and developing a relationship as well. The infant, on the other hand, has the simple, straight-forward needs that infants have, and the most important of these is a mother with the mature abilities and social support a mother should have. If the mother's parents step in to help, as one would expect, then they, too, are thrown off of their developmental tracks, back into a life-style they thought they had passed, and which they might find terribly demanding. And so on.... The ways in which our lives intermesh are terribly complex and very frustrating to the theorist. But ignoring them is to ignore something vitally important about our development and our personalities. Stage (age) Psychosocial crisis Significant relations Psychosocial modalities Psychosocial virtues Maladaptations & malignancies I (0-1) -- infant trust vs mistrust mother to get, to give in return hope, faith sensory distortion -- withdrawal II (2-3) -- toddler autonomy vs shame and doubt parents to hold on, to let go will, determination impulsivity -- compulsion III (3-6) -- preschooler initiative vs guilt family to go after, to play purpose, courage ruthlessness -- inhibition IV (7-12 or so) -- school-age child industry vs inferiority neighborhood and school to complete, to make things together competence narrow virtuosity -- inertia V (12-18 or so) -- adolescence ego-identity vs role-confusion peer groups, role models to be oneself, to share oneself fidelity, loyalty fanaticism -- repudiation VI (the 20’s) -- young adult intimacy vs isolation partners, friends to lose and find oneself in a another love promiscuity -- exclusivity VII (late 20’s to 50’s) -- middle adult generativity vs self-absorption household, workmates to make be, to take care of care overextension -- rejectivity VIII (50’s and beyond) -- old adult integrity vs despair mankind or “my kind” to be, through having been, to face not being wisdom presumption -- despair The first stage The first stage, infancy or the oral-sensory stage, is approximately the first year or year and a half of life. The task is to develop trust without completely eliminating the capacity for mistrust. If mom and dad can give the newborn a degree of familiarity, consistency, and continuity, then the child will develop the feeling that the world -- especially the social world -- is a safe place to be, that people are reliable and loving. Through the parents' responses, the child also learns to trust his or her own body and the biological urges that go with it. If the parents are unreliable and inadequate, if they reject the infant or harm it, if other interests cause both parents to turn away from the infants needs to satisfy their own instead, then the infant will develop mistrust. He or she will be apprehensive and suspicious around people. Please understand that this doesn't mean that the parents have to be perfect. In fact, parents who are overly protective of the child, are there the minute the first cry comes out, will lead that child into the maladaptive tendency Erikson calls sensory maladjustment: Overly trusting, even gullible, this person cannot believe anyone would mean them harm, and will use all the defenses at their command to retain their pollyanna perspective. Worse, of course, is the child whose balance is tipped way over on the mistrust side: They will develop the malignant tendency of withdrawal, characterized by depression, paranoia, and possibly psychosis. If the proper balance is achieved, the child will develop the virtue hope, the strong belief that, even when things are not going well, they will work out well in the end. One of the signs that a child is doing well in the first stage is when the child isn't overly upset by the need to wait a moment for the satisfaction of his or her needs: Mom or dad don't have to be perfect; I trust them enough to believe that, if they can't be here immediately, they will be here soon; Things may be tough now, but they will work out. This is the same ability that, in later life, gets us through disappointments in love, our careers, and many other domains of life. Stage two The second stage is the anal-muscular stage of early childhood, from about eighteen months to three or four years old. The task is to achieve a degree of autonomy while minimizing shame and doubt. If mom and dad (and the other care-takers that often come into the picture at this point) permit the child, now a toddler, to explore and manipulate his or her environment, the child will develop a sense of autonomy or independence. The parents should not discourage the child, but neither should they push. A balance is required. People often advise new parents to be "firm but tolerant" at this stage, and the advice is good. This way, the child will develop both self-control and self-esteem. On the other hand, it is rather easy for the child to develop instead a sense of shame and doubt. If the parents come down hard on any attempt to explore and be independent, the child will soon give up with the assumption that cannot and should not act on their own. We should keep in mind that even something as innocent as laughting at the toddler's efforts can lead the child to feel deeply ashamed, and to doubt his or her abilities. And there are other ways to lead children to shame and doubt: If you give children unrestricted freedom and no sense of limits, or if you try to help children do what they should learn to do for themselves, you will also give them the impression that they are not good for much. If you aren't patient enough to wait for your child to tie his or her shoe-laces, your child will never learn to tie them, and will assume that this is too difficult to learn! Nevertheless, a little "shame and doubt" is not only inevitable, but beneficial. Without it, you will develop the maladaptive tendency Erikson calls impulsiveness, a sort of shameless willfulness that leads you, in later childhood and even adulthood, to jump into things without proper consideration of your abilities. Worse, of course, is too much shame and doubt, which leads to the malignancy Erikson calls compulsiveness. The compulsive person feels as if their entire being rides on everything they do, and so everything must be done perfectly. Following all the rules precisely keeps you from mistakes, and mistakes must be avoided at all costs. Many of you know how it feels to always be ashamed and always doubt yourself. A little more patience and tolerance with your own children may help them avoid your path. And give yourself a little slack, too! If you get the proper, positive balance of autonomy and shame and doubt, you will develop the virtue of willpower or determination. One of the most admirable -- and frustrating -- thing about two- and three-year-olds is their determination. "Can do" is their motto. If we can preserve that "can do" attitude (with appropriate modesty to balance it) we are much better off as adults. Stage three Stage three is the genital-locomotor stage or play age. From three or four to five or six, the task confronting every child is to learn initiative without too much guilt. Initiative means a positive response to the world's challenges, taking on responsibilities, learning new skills, feeling purposeful. Parents can encourage initiative by encouraging children to try out their ideas. We should accept and encourage fantasy and curiosity and imagination. This is a time for play, not for formal education. The child is now capable, as never before, of imagining a future situation, one that isn't a reality right now. Initiative is the attempt to make that non-reality a reality. But if children can imagine the future, if they can plan, then they can be responsible as well, and guilty. If my two-year-old flushes my watch down the toilet, I can safely assume that there were no "evil intentions." It was just a matter of a shiny object going round and round and down. What fun! But if my five year old does the same thing... well, she should know what's going to happen to the watch, what's going to happen to daddy's temper, and what's going to happen to her! She can be guilty of the act, and she can begin to feel guilty as well. The capacity for moral judgement has arrived. Erikson is, of course, a Freudian, and as such, he includes the Oedipal experience in this stage. From his perspective, the Oedipal crisis involves the reluctance a child feels in relinquishing his or her closeness to the opposite sex parent. A parent has the responsibility, socially, to enourage the child to "grow up -- you're not a baby anymore!" But if this process is done too harshly and too abruptly, the child learns to feel guilty about his or her feelings. Too much initiative and too little guilt means a maladaptive tendency Erikson calls ruthlessness. The ruthless person takes the initiative alright; They have their plans, whether it's a matter of school or romance or politics or career. It's just that they don't care who they step on to achieve their goals. The goals are everything, and guilty feelings are for the weak. The extreme form of ruthlessess is sociopathy. Ruthlessness is bad for others, but actually relatively easy on the ruthless person. Harder on the person is the malignancy of too much guilt, which Erikson calls inhibition. The inhibited person will not try things because "nothing ventured, nothing lost" and, particularly, nothing to feel guilty about. On the sexual, Oedipal, side, the inhibited person may be impotent or frigid. A good balance leads to the psychosocial strength of purpose. A sense of purpose is something many people crave in their lives, yet many do not realize that they themselves make their purposes, through imagination and initiative. I think an even better word for this virtue would have been courage, the capacity for action despite a clear understanding of your limitations and past failings. Stage four Stage four is the latency stage, or the school-age child from about six to twelve. The task is to develop a capacity for industry while avoiding an excessive sense of inferiority. Children must "tame the imagination" and dedicate themselves to education and to learning the social skills their society requires of them. There is a much broader social sphere at work now: The parents and other family members are joined by teachers and peers and other members of he community at large. They all contribute: Parents must encourage, teachers must care, peers must accept. Children must learn that there is pleasure not only in conceiving a plan, but in carrying it out. They must learn the feeling of success, whether it is in school or on the playground, academic or social. A good way to tell the difference between a child in the third stage and one in the fourth stage is to look at the way they play games. Four-year-olds may love games, but they will have only a vague understanding of the rules, may change them several times during the course of the game, and be very unlikely to actually finish the game, unless it is by throwing the pieces at their opponents. A seven-year-old, on the other hand, is dedicated to the rules, considers them pretty much sacred, and is more likely to get upset if the game is not allowed to come to its required conclusion. If the child is allowed too little success, because of harsh teachers or rejecting peers, for example, then he or she will develop instead a sense of inferiority or incompetence. An additional source of inferiority Erikson mentions is racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination: If a child believes that success is related to who you are rather than to how hard you try, then why try? Too much industry leads to the maladaptive tendency called narrow virtuosity. We see this in children who aren't allowed to "be children," the ones that parents or teachers push into one area of competence, without allowing the development of broader interests. These are the kids without a life: child actors, child athletes, child musicians, child prodigies of all sorts. We all admire their industry, but if we look a little closer, it's all that stands in the way of an empty life. Much more common is the malignancy called inertia. This includes all of us who suffer from the "inferiority complexes" Alfred Adler talked about. If at first you don't succeed, don't ever try again! Many of us didn't do well in mathematics, for example, so we'd die before we took another math class. Others were humiliated instead in the gym class, so we never try out for a sport or play a game of raquetball. Others never developed social skills -- the most important skills of all -- and so we never go out in public. We become inert. A happier thing is to develop the right balance of industry and inferiority -- that is, mostly industry with just a touch of inferiority to keep us sensibly humble. Then we have the virtue called competency. Stage five Stage five is adolescence, beginning with puberty and ending around 18 or 20 years old. The task during adolescence is to achieve ego identity and avoid role confusion. It was adolescence that interested Erikson first and most, and the patterns he saw here were the bases for his thinking about all the other stages. Ego identity means knowing who you are and how you fit in to the rest of society. It requires that you take all you've learned about life and yourself and mold it into a unified self-image, one that your community finds meaningful. There are a number of things that make things easier: First, we should have a mainstream adult culture that is worthy of the adolescent's respect, one with good adult role models and open lines of communication. Further, society should provide clear rites of passage, certain accomplishments and rituals that help to distinguish the adult from the child. In primitive and traditional societies, an adolescent boy may be asked to leave the village for a period of time to live on his own, hunt some symbolic animal, or seek an inspirational vision. Boys and girls may be required to go through certain tests of endurance, symbolic ceremonies, or educational events. In one way or another, the distinction between the powerless, but irresponsible, time of childhood and the powerful and responsbile time of adulthood, is made clear. Without these things, we are likely to see role confusion, meaning an uncertainty about one's place in society and the world. When an adolescent is confronted by role confusion, Erikson say he or she is suffering from an identity crisis. In fact, a common question adolescents in our society ask is a straight-forward question of identity: "Who am I?" One of Erikson's suggestions for adolescence in our society is the psychosocial moratorium. He suggests you take a little "time out." If you have money, go to Europe. If you don't, bum around the U.S. Quit school and get a job. Quit your job and go to school. Take a break, smell the roses, get to know yourself. We tend to want to get to "success" as fast as possible, and yet few of us have ever taken the time to figure out what success means to us. A little like the young Oglala Dakota, perhaps we need to dream a little. There is such a thing as too much "ego identity," where a person is so involved in a particular role in a particular society or subculture that there is no room left for tolerance. Erikson calls this maladaptive tendency fanaticism. A fanatic believes that his way is the only way. Adolescents are, of course, known for their idealism, and for their tendency to see things in black-and-white. These people will gather others around them and promote their beliefs and life-styles without regard to others' rights to disagree. The lack of identity is perhaps more difficult still, and Erikson refers to the malignant tendency here as repudiation. They repudiate their membership in the world of adults and, even more, they repudiate their need for an identity. Some adolescents allow themselves to "fuse" with a group, especially the kind of group that is particularly eager to provide the details of your identity: religious cults, militaristic organizations, groups founded on hatred, groups that have divorced themselves from the painful demands of mainstream society. They may become involved in destructive activities, drugs, or alcohol, or you may withdraw into their own psychotic fantasies. After all, being "bad" or being "nobody" is better than not knowing who you are! If you successfully negotiate this stage, you will have the virtue Erikson called fidelity. Fidelity means loyalty, the ability to live by societies standards despite their imperfections and incompleteness and inconsistencies. We are not talking about blind loyalty, and we are not talking about accepting the imperfections. After all, if you love your community, you will want to see it become the best it can be. But fidelity means that you have found a place in that community, a place that will allow you to contribute. Stage six If you have made it this far, you are in the stage of young adulthood, which lasts from about 18 to about 30. The ages in the adult stages are much fuzzier than in the childhood stages, and people may differ dramatically. The task is to achieve some degree of intimacy, as opposed to remaining in isolation. Intimacy is the ability to be close to others, as a lover, a friend, and as a participant in society. Because you have a clear sense of who you are, you no longer need to fear "losing" yourself, as many adolescents do. The "fear of commitment" some people seem to exhibit is an example of immaturity in this stage. This fear isn't always so obvious. Many people today are always putting off the progress of their relationships: I'll get married (or have a family, or get involved in important social issues) as soon as I finish school, as soon as I have a job, as soon as I have a house, as soon as.... If you've been engaged for the last ten years, what's holding you back? Neither should the young adult need to prove him- or herself anymore. A teenage relationship is often a matter of trying to establish identity through "couple-hood." Who am I? I'm her boy-friend. The young adult relationship should be a matter of two independent egos wanting to create something larger than themselves. We intuitively recognize this when we frown on a relationship between a young adult and a teenager: We see the potential for manipulation of the younger member of the party by the older. Our society hasn't done much for young adults, either. The emphasis on careers, the isolation of urban living, the splitting apart of relationships because of our need for mobility, and the general impersonal nature of modern life prevent people from naturally developing their intimate relationships. I am typical of many people in having moved dozens of times in my life. I haven't the faintest idea what has happened to the kids I grew up with, or even my college buddies. My oldest friend lives a thousand miles away. I live where I do out of career necessity and feel no real sense of community. Before I get too depressing, let me mention that many of you may not have had these experiences. If you grew up and stayed in your community, and especially if your community is a rural one, you are much more likely to have deep, long-lasting friendships, to have married your high school sweetheart, and to feel a great love for your community. But this style of life is quickly becoming an anachronism. Erikson calls the maladaptive form promiscuity, refering particularly to the tendency to become intimate too freely, too easily, and without any depth to your intimacy. This can be true of your relationships with friends and neighbors and your whole community as well as with lovers. The malignancy he calls exclusion, which refers to the tendency to isolate oneself from love, friendship, and community, and to develop a certain hatefulness in compensation for one's loneliness. If you successfully negotiate this stage, you will instead carry with you for the rest of your life the virtue or psychosocial strength Erikson calls love. Love, in the context of his theory, means being able to put aside differences and antagonisms through "mutuality of devotion." It includes not only the love we find in a good marriage, but the love between friends and the love of one's neighbor, co-worker, and compatriot as well. Stage seven The seventh stage is that of middle adulthood. It is hard to pin a time to it, but it would include the period during which we are actively involved in raising children. For most people in our society, this would put it somewhere between the middle twenties and the late fifties. The task here is to cultivate the proper balance of generativity and stagnation. Generativity is an extension of love into the future. It is a concern for the next generation and all future generations. As such, it is considerably less "selfish" than the intimacy of the previous stage: Intimacy, the love between lovers or friends, is a love between equals, and it is necessarily reciprocal. Oh, of course we love each other unselfishly, but the reality is such that, if the love is not returned, we don't consider it a true love. With generativity, that implicit expectation of reciprocity isn't there, at least not as strongly. Few parents expect a "return on their investment" from their children; If they do, we don't think of them as very good parents! Although the majority of people practice generativity by having and raising children, there are many other ways as well. Erikson considers teaching, writing, invention, the arts and sciences, social activism, and generally contributing to the welfare of future generations to be generativity as well -- anything, in fact, that satisfies that old "need to be needed." Stagnation, on the other hand, is self-absorption, caring for no-one. The stagnant person ceases to be a productive member of society. It is perhaps hard to imagine that we should have any "stagnation" in our lives, but the maladaptive tendency Erikson calls overextension illustrates the problem: Some people try to be so generative that they no longer allow time for themselves, for rest and relaxation. The person who is overextended no longer contributes well. I'm sure we all know someone who belongs to so many clubs, or is devoted to so many causes, or tries to take so many classes or hold so many jobs that they no longer have time for any of them! More obvious, of course, is the malignant tendency of rejectivity. Too little generativity and too much stagnation and you are no longer participating in or contributing to society. And much of what we call "the meaning of life" is a matter of how we participate and what we contribute. This is the stage of the "midlife crisis." Sometimes men and women take a look at their lives and ask that big, bad question "what am I doing for?" Notice the question carefully: Because their focus is on themselves, they ask what, rather then whom, they are doing it for. Inn their panic at getting older and not having experienced or accomplished what they imagined they would when they were younger, they try to recapture their youth. Men are often the most flambouyant examples: They leave their long-suffering wives, quit their humdrum jobs, buy some "hip" new clothes, and start hanging around singles bars. Of course, they seldom find what they are looking for, because they are looking for the wrong thing! But if you are successful at this stage, you will have a capacity for caring that will serve you through the rest of your life. Stage eight This last stage, referred to delicately as late adulthood or maturity, or less delicately as old age, begins sometime around retirement, after the kids have gone, say somewhere around 60. Some older folks will protest and say it only starts when you feel old and so on, but that's an effect of our youth-worshipping culture, which has even old people avoiding any acknowledgement of age. In Erikson's theory, reaching this stage is a good thing, and not reaching it suggests that earlier problems retarded your development! The task is to develop ego integrity with a minimal amount of despair. This stage, especially from the perspective of youth, seems like the most difficult of all. First comes a detachment from society, from a sense of usefulness, for most people in our culture. Some retire from jobs they've held for years; others find their duties as parents coming to a close; most find that their input is no longer requested or required. Then there is a sense of biological uselessness, as the body no longer does everything it used to. Women go through a sometimes dramatic menopause; Men often find they can no longer "rise to the occasion." Then there are the illnesses of old age, such as arthritis, diabetes, heart problems, concerns about breast and ovarian and prostrate cancers. There come fears about things that one was never afraid of before -- the flu, for example, or just falling down. Along with the illnesses come concerns of death. Friends die. Relatives die. One's spouse dies. It is, of course, certain that you, too, will have your turn. Faced with all this, it might seem like everyone would feel despair. In response to this despair, some older people become preoccupied with the past. After all, that's where things were better. Some become preoccupied with their failures, the bad decisions they made, and regret that (unlike some in the previous stage) they really don't have the time or energy to reverse them. We find some older people become depressed, spiteful, paranoid, hypochondriacal, or developing the patterns of senility with or without physical bases. Ego integrity means coming to terms with your life, and thereby coming to terms with the end of life. If you are able to look back and accept the course of events, the choices made, your life as you lived it, as being necessary, then you needn't fear death. Although most of you are not at this point in life, perhaps you can still sympathize by considering your life up to now. We've all made mistakes, some of them pretty nasty ones; Yet, if you hadn't made these mistakes, you wouldn't be who you are. If you had been very fortunate, or if you had played it safe and made very few mistakes, your life would not have been as rich as is. The maladaptive tendency in stage eight is called presumption. This is what happens when a person "presumes" ego integrity without actually facing the difficulties of old age. The malignant tendency is called disdain, by which Erikson means a contempt of life, one's own or anyone's. Someone who approaches death without fear has the strength Erikson calls wisdom. He calls it a gift to children, because "healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death." He suggests that a person must be somewhat gifted to be truly wise, but I would like to suggest that you understand "gifted" in as broad a fashion as possible: I have found that there are people of very modest gifts who have taught me a great deal, not by their wise words, but by their simple and gentle approach to life and death, by their "generosity of spirit." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Discussion I can't think of anyone, other than Jean Piaget, who has promoted the stage approach to development more than Erik Erikson. And yet stages are not at all a popular concept among personality theorists. Of the people reviewed in this text, only Sigmund and Anna Freud fully share his convictions. Most theorists prefer an incremental or gradual approach to development, and speak of "phases" or "transitions" rather than of clearly marked stages.. But there are certain segments of life that are fairly easy to identify, that do have the necessary quality of biologically determined timing. Adolescence is "preprogrammed" to occur when it occurs, as is birth and, very possibly, natural death. The first year of life has some special, fetus-like qualities, and the last year of life includes certain "catastrophic" qualities. If we stretch the meaning of stages to include certain logical sequences, i.e. things that happen in a certain order, not because they are biologically so programmed, but because they don't make sense any other way, we can make an even better case: weaning and potty training have to precede the independence from mother required by schooling; one is normally sexually mature before finding a lover, normally finds a lover before having children, and necessarily has children before enjoying their leaving! And if we stretch the meaning of stages even further to include social "programming" as well as biological, we can include periods of dependence and schooling and work and retirement as well. So stretched, it is no longer a difficult matter to come up with seven or eight stages; Only now, of course, you'd be hard pressed to call them stages, rather than "phases" or something equally vague. It is, in fact, hard to defend Erikson's eight stages if we accept the demands of his understanding of what stages are. In different cultures, even within cultures, the timing can be quite different: In some countries, babies are weaned at six months and potty trained at nine months; in others, they still get the breast at five and potty training involves little more than taking it outside. At one time in our own culture, people were married at thirteen and had their first child by fifteen. Today, we tend to postpone marriage until thirty and rush to have our one and only child before forty. We look forward to many years of retirement; in other times and other places, retirement is unknown. And yet Erikson's stages do seem to give us a framework. We can talk about our culture as compared with others', or today as compared with a few centuries ago, by looking at the ways in which we differ relative to the "standard" his theory provides. Erikson and other researchers have found that the general pattern does in fact hold across cultures and times, and most of us find it quite familiar. In other words, his theory meets one of the most important standards of personality theory, a standard sometimes more important than "truth:" It is useful. It also offers us insights we might not have noticed otherwise. For example, you may tend to think of his eight stages as a series of tasks that don't follow any particularly logical course. But if you divide the lifespan into two sequences of four stages, you can see a real pattern, with a child development half and an adult development half. In stage I, the infant must learn that "it" (meaning the world, especially as represented by mom and dad and itself) is "okay." In stage II, the toddler learns "I can do," in the here-and-now. In stage III, the preschooler learns "I can plan," and project him or herself into the future. In stage IV, the school-age child learns "I can finish" these projections. In going through these four stages, the child develops a competent ego, ready for the larger world. In the adult half of the scheme, we expand beyond the ego. Stage V, is concerned with establishing something very similar to "it is okay:" The adolescent must learn that "I am okay," a conclusion predicated on successful negotiation of the preceding four stages. In stage VI, the young adult must learn to love, which is a sort of social "I can do," in the here-and-now. In stage VII, the adult must learn to extend that love into the future, as caring. And in stage VIII, the old person must learn to "finish" him- or herself as an ego, and establish a new and broader identity. We could borrow Jung's term, and say that the second half of live is devoted to realizing one's self. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Readings Erikson is an excellent writer and will capture your imagination whether you are convinced by his Freudian side or not. The two books that lay out his theory are Childhood and Society and Identity: Youth and Crisis. These are more like collections of essays on subjects as varied as Native American tribes, famous people like William James and Adolph Hitler, nationality, race, and gender. His most famous books are two studies in "Psychohistory," Young Man Luther on Martin Luther, and Ghandi's Truth. His work has inspired many others, and we now have a journal called The Journal of Psychohistory, which contains fascinating articles not only about famous people but about the child-rearing practices and developmental rites of every part of this globe and every era of history. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1997, C. George Boeree