Erik Erikson's Theories of Personality

• Theories of Personality and Psychopathology covered the work of Erik H. Erikson.
• In Psychiatry I at New Era University College of Medicine, A.Y. 2024-2025

Lecture Objectives

• The lecture discusses Erik Erikson's life and contributions to Psychiatry.
• The lecture focuses on the eight stages of Erikson's theory on Psychosocial Development.

Erik H. Erikson's Background

• Erik Erikson was born on June 15, 1902, in Frankfurt, Germany and died on May 12, 1994.
• He was born to a wealthy Danish mother of Jewish descent.
• Erikson's mother had married earlier, but her husband disappeared shortly after the wedding.
• She became pregnant by another man, whose name was never revealed.
• She was sent to Germany to avoid having a child out of wedlock, and Erik was born.
• After Erik's birth, his mother married Dr. Theodore Hamburger, Erik's pediatrician, and they remained in Frankfurt.
• Erikson did not initially know that Dr. Homburger was not his biological father.
• He claimed he grew up unsure of his name and psychological identity.
• Another identity crisis occurred when Erikson started school.
• Despite his Danish parentage, he considered himself German.
• His German classmates rejected him because his mother and stepfather were of Jewish descent.
• Erikson earned mediocre grades but showed talent for art.
• After graduating high school, he used art to try to establish his identity.
• He dropped out of conventional society and traveled extensively in Europe.
• He read, recorded his thoughts in a notebook, and observed life around him.
• Erikson described himself as morbidly sensitive and neurotic, even close to psychotic.
• At age 25, Erikson was offered a teaching position at a school in Vienna.
• The school catered to children of Sigmund Freud's patients and friends.
• He accepted the post, starting his professional career and finding an identity.
• Erikson trained in psychoanalysis and was analyzed by Anna Freud almost daily for 3 years.
• Her influence made him aware of the importance of social influences on personality, leading him to focus on child development.

Theory of Psychosocial Development

• Erikson divided the growth of personality into eight successive psychosocial stages.
• In each stage, individuals must cope with a crisis adaptively or maladaptively.
• The first four stages are similar to Freud's oral, anal, phallic, and latency stages.
• Erikson emphasized psychosocial factors, while Freud focused on biological factors.
• Erikson suggested development is governed by the epigenetic principle of maturation.
• Human development is governed by a sequence of stages dependent on genetic or hereditary factors.
• Social and environmental forces influence how genetically predetermined stages are realized.
• Human development involves a series of personal conflicts.
• The potential for these conflicts exists at birth as innate predispositions.
• Conflicts become prominent at different stages when the environment demands certain adaptations.
• Confrontation with the environment is a crisis, involving a shift in perspective.
• A crisis requires individuals to refocus their instinctual energy according to the needs of each stage of the life cycle.
• Each developmental stage has its particular crisis or turning point, necessitating a change in behavior and development.
• Individuals may reason in one of two ways: maladaptively (negatively) or adaptively (positively).
• Only when conflicts are resolved can the personality continue its normal developmental sequence.
• Achieving resolution allows acquiring the strength to confront the next stage's crisis.
• The ego must incorporate maladaptive and adaptive ways of coping.
• In infancy, the crisis of helplessness and dependency leads to developing trust or mistrust.
• Trust is the more adaptive coping mechanism.
• Some degree of mistrust is also necessary for protection from deception or manipulation.
• Only then can the crisis is satisfactorily resolved.
• Each of the eight psychosocial stages provides an opportunity to develop basic strengths.
• Basic strengths are motivating characteristics and beliefs derived from the satisfactory resolution of the crisis at each developmental stage.

Stages of Psychosocial Development

Trust versus Mistrust

• The oral-sensory stage of psychosocial development parallels Freud's oral stage.
• It occurs during the first year of life, when the individual is most helpless.
• The infant depends entirely on the mother or primary caregiver for survival, security, and affection.
• The relationship between the infant and his/her world is biological and social.
• The baby's interaction with the mother determines whether trust or mistrust is incorporated for future interactions.
• If the mother responds appropriately to the infant's physical needs and provides ample affection, love, and security, the infant develops trust.
• Infants learn to expect "consistency, continuity, and sameness" from others and situations.
• Erikson suggests that this expectation provides the beginning of ego identity.
• If the mother is rejecting, inattentive, or inconsistent, the infant develops mistrust.
• This infant becomes suspicious, fearful, and anxious.
• The basic strength of hope is associated with the successful resolution of the crisis during the oral-sensory stage.
• Hope is the belief that our desires will be satisfied.
• Hope involves persistent confidence, a feeling maintained despite setbacks or reverses.

Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt

• During the muscular-anal stage, which occurs during the second and third years of life and corresponds to Freud's anal stage, children develop physical and mental abilities enabling them to do many things.
• They learn to communicate more effectively and to walk, climb, push, pull, hold on to, and let go of objects.
• Children take pride in these skills and want to do as much as possible.
• Erikson believed that the most important abilities involve holding on and letting go.
• He considered these abilities prototypes for reacting to later conflicts in behaviors and attitudes.
• Holding on can be displayed in a loving or hostile way.
• letting go can be destructive rage or relaxed passivity.
• The important point is that during this stage, children can exercise some choice, to experience the power of their autonomous will.
• The key question becomes, how much will society, in the form of parents, allow children to express themselves and do all they are capable of doing?
• The major crisis between parent and child at this stage involves toilet training, the first instance when society attempts to regulate an instinctual need.
• A child is taught to hold on and let go only at appropriate times and places.
• Parents may permit the child to proceed with toilet training at his or her own pace or may become annoyed.
• In that case, parents may deny the child's free will by forcing the training, showing impatience and anger at incorrect behavior.
• When parents thwart and frustrate a child's attempt to exercise independence, the child develops self-doubt and shame.
• The basic strength that develops from autonomy is will, involving determination to exercise freedom of choice and self-restraint in the face of society's demands.

Initiative versus Guilt

• Occurring between ages 3 and 5 the locomotor-genital stage corresponding to the phallic stage in Freud's system.
• Motor and mental abilities continue to develop, and children can accomplish more.
• Children express a strong desire to take the initiative in many activities.
• Initiative also may be developed in the form of fantasies.
• Fantasies can manifest in the desire to possess the parent of the opposite sex and in rivalry with the parent of the same sex.
• Punishing and inhibiting displays of initiative leads to persistent guilt feelings that affect self-directed activities.
• In the Oedipal relationship, the child inevitably fails, but the parents guide the situation with love and understanding, the child will acquire an awareness of permissible behavior and what is not.
• The child's initiative can be channeled toward realistic and socially sanctioned goals.
• This phase prepares them for adult responsibility and morality, and in Freudian terms, this superego.
• The basic strength called purpose arises from initiative.
• Which involves the courage to envision and pursue goals.

Industry versus Inferiority

• Erikson's latency stage of psychosocial development occurs from ages 6 to 11 and corresponds to Freud's latency period.
• Ideally, children learn good work and study habits (industriousness) through school and home.
• This is primarily a means of attaining praise and finding satisfaction from successfully completing a task.
• The child's growing powers of deductive reasoning and the ability to play by rules lead to refining skills in building things deliberately.
• Children make attempts to complete a task by applying concentrated attention, diligence, and persistence.
• Children that are scolded, ridiculed, or rejected, develop feelings of inferiority and inadequacy.
• Encouragement comes through praise and reinforcement of competence and continued striving.
• The basic strength during the latency stage is competence, involving the exertion of skill and intelligence completing tasks.
• The crisis' outcome at each childhood stage primarily depends on other people's actions.
• The resolution depends more on what is done to the child than what the child can do for themself.
• Although children experience increasing independence from birth to age 11, parents and teachers most influence psychosocial development.

Identity Cohesion versus Role Confusion

• Adolescence, between ages 12 and 18, resolves the crisis of basic ego identity or self-image.
• A self-image integrates ideas about ourselves and how others think of us.
• A consistent and congruent picture results from satisfactory resolution.
• Shaping and accepting an identity are difficult and often filled with anxiety.
• Adolescents experiment with different roles and ideologies for compatibility.
• Adolescence, suggests Erikson, is a hiatus or psychological moratorium between childhood and adulthood.
• This grants the person time and energy to try different roles and self-images..
• Those emerging from this stage with a strong sense of self-identity confidently face adulthood.
• Failure results in identity crisis or role confusion and a lack of the individual's knowledge of themself and belonging,
• They may withdraw from normal life progressions or seek a negative identity in crime or drugs.
• A negative identity is preferable to no identity, though less satisfactory than a positive one.
• The basic strength developed in adolescence is fidelity, which emerges from coherent ego.
• Fidelity encompasses sincerity, genuineness, and a sense of duty in relationships.

Intimacy versus Isolation

• Erikson considered young adulthood to be a longer stage than the previous ones, extend- ing from the end of adolescence to about age 35.
• Gaining indepence from parents and quasi-parental institutions like college, it involves functioning autonomously as mature, responsible adults.
• The stage involves establishing intimate relationships (close friendships, sexual unions) and engaging in productive work.
• Erikson's view of intimacy included feelings of caring and commitment and not merely sexual relationships.
• Those emotions could be displayed openly without needing protective defense mechanisms or fear of losing self-identity.
• People who fail to establish intimacies in young adulthood will develop feelings of isolation.
• They avoid social contact and reject other people, becoming aggressive, which poses them as a threat to their ego identity .
• The basic strength in those young adult years that emerges from intimacy is love, which Erikson considered the greatest human virtue.
• Erikson described love as devotion based on shared identity or a merging of self with another person.

Generativity versus Stagnation

• Adulthood, approximately ages 35 to 55, needs active engagement in teaching and guiding the next generation.
• In Erikson's view, the concern grows broader and long-range, including future generations and the kind of society they will live in.
• Displaying generativity doesn't require being a parent, and having children doesn't automatically satisfy this urge.
• All institutions provide opportunities for generativity whether it is business, government, social work or academia.
• People can become mentors, teachers, or guides to betterment for society at large through involvement in various activities.
• Middle-aged people who don't seek an outlet for generativity may experience stagnation, boredom, and interpersonal impoverishment.
• These emotional hardships echo those associated with the midlife crisis.
• If lacking generativity, people may regress to pseudo-intimacy, behaving in childlike ways.
• The basic strength arising from generativity in adulthood being care.
• Care, to him, was a broad concern for others manifesting in teaching, not just to help but to fulfill one's identity.

Ego Integrity versus Despair

• Maturity and old age, the final stage of psychosocial development, offers a choice between ego integrity and despair.
• Attitudes determine how we evaluate our life, and we reflect on our major endeavors moving towards their completion.
• People will have ego integrity should they look back and possess satisfaction and fulfillment and believe that they have coped with all of life’s victories and failures.
• Essentially, ego integrity stems from accepting one's place and their past.
• Despair is the result of feeling frustration, anger regarding missed opportunities and regret from mistakes that cannot be rectified.
• The basic strength relating to this developmental stage is wisdom.
• The detached concern for the wholeness of life is the origin for gaining wisdom from the state of gaining ego integrity.
• Heritage describes the passing along of one integration of experience onto future generations.

Basic Weaknesses

• Basic weaknesses and basic strengths arise in each stage of psychosocial development.
• The adaptive and maladaptive ways of coping with the crisis in each stage are incorporated into the ego identity for creative balance.
• The ego consists of mostly adaptive attitudes plus some negative attitudes.
• Maldevelopment results in a stage of imbalance from the ego consisting solely of one attitude, either the adaptive or the maladaptive one.
• Maladaptive egos only contain all positive, adaptive traits, leading to neuroses.
• Malignant egos only contain negative traits, leading to psychosis.