Erikson's Psychosocial Stages of Development PDF

1 ERIKSON’S PSYCHOSOCIAL THEORY The Eight Psychosocial Stages of Development Stage One Psychosocial Crisis The first stage, infancy, is approximately the first year, or year and a half of life. The crisis is trust vs. mistrust. The goal is to develop trust without completely elim...

1 ERIKSON’S PSYCHOSOCIAL THEORY The Eight Psychosocial Stages of Development Stage One Psychosocial Crisis The first stage, infancy, is approximately the first year, or year and a half of life. The crisis is trust vs. mistrust. The goal is to develop trust without completely eliminating the capacity for mistrust. If the primary caregivers, like the parents, can give the baby a sense of familiarity, consistency and continuity, then the baby will develop the feeling that the world is a safe place to be, that people are reliable and loving. 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 infant’s needs to satisfy own instead, then the infant will develop mistrust. He or she will be apprehensive and suspicious around people.` Maladaptation/Malignancy This doesn’t mean that the parents have to be perfect. In fact, parents who are overly protective of the child, who are there the minute the first cry comes out, will lead that child into the maladaptive tendency which 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 find an explanation or excuse for the person who did him wrong. Worse, is the child whose balance is  2 tipped way over on the mistrust side. They will develop the malignant tendency of withdrawal, characterized by depression, paranoia, and possibly psychosis. Virtue If the proper balance is achieved, the child will develop the virtue of 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. 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 Psychosocial Crisis The second stage is 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 the parents or caregiver permits 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. 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  3 attempt to explore and be independent, the child will soon give up with the belief that he/she cannot and should not act on his/her own. We should keep in mind that even something as innocent as laughing at the toddler’s efforts can lead the child to feel deeply ashamed and to doubt his or her abilities. 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 shoelaces, your child will never learn to tie them, and will assume that this is too difficult to learn. Maladaptation/Malignancy A little shame and doubt is not only inevitable, but also beneficial. Without it, you will develop the maladaptive tendency Erikson calls impulsiveness, a sort of shameless willfulness that leads you, in later childhood or even adulthood, to jump into things without proper consideration of your abilities. Worse is too much shame and doubt which leads to the malignancy Erikson calls compulsiveness. The compulsive person feels as if his entire being rides on everything he does, and so everything must be done perfectly. Following all the rules precisely keeps you from mistakes, and mistakes must be avoided at all costs.  4 Virtue 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 – things about two- and three-year-olds is their determination. “Can do” is their motto. If we can preserve that “can do” attitude, we are much better off as adults. Stage Three Psychosocial Crisis Stage three is the early childhood stage, from three or four to five or six. The task 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. The capacity for moral judgment begins. Erikson is a Freudian and as such, he includes the Oedipal experience in this stage. From his perspective, the  5 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 encourage the child to grow up, but if this process is done too harshly and too abruptly, the child learns to feel guilty about his or her feelings. Maladaptation/Malignancy Too much initiative and too little guilt means a maladaptive tendency Erikson calls ruthlessness. To be ruthless is to be heartless or unfeeling or without mercy. 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 the only things that matter, and guilty feelings and mercy are only signs of weakness. The extreme form of ruthlessness 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. They are so afraid to start and take a lead on a project. They fear that if it fails, they will be blamed. Virtue  6 A good balance leads to the psychosocial strength of purpose. A sense of purpose is something many people crave for in their lives, yet many do not realize that they themselves make their purposes through imagination and initiative. Stage Four Psychosocial Crisis Stage four is the school-age stage when the child is 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 the 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  7 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. Additional sources of inferiority, Erikson mentions, are 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? Maladaptation/Malignancy 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 look  8 at another math class. Others were humiliated instead in the gym class, so we never try out for a sport or play a game of basketball. Others never developed social skills – the most important skills of all – and so we never go out in public. We become inert. Virtue 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. The we have the virtue called competency. Stage Five Psychosocial Crisis 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. Ego identity means knowing who you are and how you fit into 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.  9 Further, society should provide clear rites of passage, certain accomplishments and rituals that help to distinguish the adults 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 powerless and irresponsible time of childhood 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 says, he or she is suffering from an identity crisis. In fact, a common question adolescents ask is a straightforward question of identity – “Who am I?” One of Erikson’s suggestions for adolescence is the psychosocial moratorium. He suggests you take a little time out. If you have money, go to other places. 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.  10 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 lifestyles without regard to others’ rights to disagree. Malignancy/Maladaptation The lack of identity is perhaps more difficult still, and Erikson refers to the malignant tendency here as repudiation. To repudiate is to reject. They reject their membership in the world of adults and even more, they reject their need for an identity. Some adolescents prefer to join groups that go against the norms to form their 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 they may withdraw into their own psychotic fantasies. After all, being “bad” or being “nobody” is better than knowing who you are. Virtue If you successfully negotiate this stage, you will have the virtue Erikson called fidelity. Fidelity means loyalty, the ability to live by society’s standards despite its  11 imperfections, incompleteness and inconsistencies. It is not about blind loyalty, nor about accepting the imperfections. Fidelity means that you have found a place in that community, a place that will allow you to contribute. Stage Six Psychosocial Crisis If you have made it this far, you are in the stage of young adulthood, which lasts from about 18 to 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 obvious. 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. 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  12 manipulation of the younger member of the party by the older. Maladaptation/Malignancy Erikson calls the maladaptive form promiscuity, referring particularly to the tendency to become intimate too freely, too easily, and without any depth to 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, refers to the tendency to isolate oneself from love, friendship, and community, and to develop a certain hatefulness in compensation for one’s loneliness. Virtue If you successfully negotiate this stage, you will instead carry with you for the rest of your life the virtue of 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 Psychosocial Crisis The seventh stage is that of middle adulthood. It is hard to pin a time to it, but it would include the period during  13 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 mutual. With generativity, the individual, like a parent, does not expect to be repaid for the love he gives to his children. 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, and social activism as generally contributing to the welfare of future generations to be generativity as well – anything that satisfies the “need to be needed” concept. Stagnation, on the other hand, is self-absorption, caring for no one. The stagnant person stops to be a productive member of society. Maladaptation/Malignancy 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  14 allow time for themselves for rest and relaxation. The person who is overextended no longer contributes well. There are those who belong 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 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 all this for?” Because the focus is on themselves, they ask what, rather than whom, they are doing it for. In 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 more flamboyant examples. They leave their long-suffering wives, quit their jobs, buy some hip new clothes, and start hanging around singles’ bars. However, they seldom find what they are looking for, because they are looking for the wrong thing. Virtue  15 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 Psychosocial Crisis This last stage, referred to as late adulthood or maturity, or old age, begins sometime around retirement, sometime around 60. Some older folks will protest and say it only starts when you feel old, but that’s an effect of our youth-worshipping culture, which has even old people avoiding any acknowledgment of age. In Erikson’s theory, reaching this stage is a good thing, and not reaching it suggests that earlier problems retarded one’s development. The task is to develop ego integrity with a minimal amount of despair. This stage 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. Then there are the illnesses of old age. There come fears about one was never afraid of before. Along with the illnesses come concerns of death. Friends die, Relatives die,  16 One’s spouse dies. It is, of course, certain that you too will have your turn. Faced with all these, 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 their failures, the bad decisions they made, and regret that that they don’t anymore have the time or energy to reverse them. We find some older people become depressed, paranoid, spiteful, 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, then you needn’t fear death. Although most of you are not yet at this point in life, perhaps you can still sympathize by considering your life up to now. We’ve all made mistakes, yet if you had not 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 it is. Maladaptation/Malignancy The maladaptive tendency in stage eight is called presumption. This is what happens when a person presumes ego integrity without actually facing the  17 difficulties of old age. The person in old age believes that he alone is right. He does not respect the ideas and views of the young. The malignant tendency is called disdain, by which Erikson means a contempt of life, one’s own or anyone’s. The person becomes very negative and appears to hate life. Virtue Someone who approaches death without fear has the strength Erikson calls wisdom. He calls it a gift to children because 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. Summary of the Stages Stage Psychosocial Crisis Basic Virtue Age 1. Trust vs. Mistrust Hope 0 - 1½ 2. Autonomy vs. Shame Will 1½ - 3 3. Initiative vs. Guilt Purpose 3-5 4. Industry vs. Inferiority Competency 6 - 12 5. Identity vs. Role Confusion Fidelity 12 - 18 6. Intimacy vs. Isolation Love 18 - 40  18 Stage Psychosocial Crisis Basic Virtue Age 7. Generativity vs. Stagnation Care 40 - 65 8. Ego Integrity vs. Despair Wisdom 65+