ERIKSON: THE STAGES OF LIFE
Despite Jung’s suggestive ideas on adult growth, he did not attract many disciples, largely because his outlook was metaphysical and spiritual rather than scientific and sexual. Instead, Erik Erikson became the most influential psychoanalytic thinker on this subject as he built on Freud’s foundations, and then forged beyond the early years to show how development proceeds throughout the entire life span. Erikson’s concepts have influenced scores of social scientists now exploring the problems of adulthood.
Perhaps the most important departure is that Erikson sees the mind in its essence as always developing, whereas Freud saw the mind as largely structured and set in childhood. This fundamental difference led Erikson to regard the life cycle as a continuing series of steps, each presenting possibilities for new growth, in contrast to Freud’s view of the adult years as a mere unfolding of events whose direction has already been determined.
Erikson took another step forward with his concept of identity, which links man’s internal psyche with the external world of culture, history, and society. And by now many of us arc familiar with this concept, and also with his formulation of the Eight Stages of Man.
Outlining these stages, he suggested that psychosocial development proceeds by critical steps, or “crises”: decisive turning points where a shift one way or another, for better or for worse, is unavoidable. Erikson underscored this aspect of a developmental crisis by assigning double terms to each life stage, thereby emphasizing the either/or nature of the outcome.
“A new life task presents a crisis whose outcome can be a successful graduation, or alternatively, an impairment of the life cycle which will aggravate future crises,” he explains. “Each crisis prepares the next, as one step leads to another; and each crisis also lays one more cornerstone for the adult personality.”
In Erikson’s scheme the first five stages correspond to Freud’s stages of psychosexual development; and the next three, it has been suggested, seem to have been inspired by Jung’s concept of individuation. During the identity crisis of adolescence, development becomes more complex than it was in childhood, says Erikson: A restructuring of all previous identifications occurs, which often means having to fight some earlier battles over again.
The complexity increases even more as a person proceeds through the adult stages of this hierarchy. Each of the next three stages adds either a “blessing” or a “curse,” says Erikson, and at the same time makes “a new ensemble” out of the preceding steps in development. When a later crisis is severe, earlier issues are likely to be revived. And despite the identity crisis having been resolved in adolescence, later resses can precipitate its renewal. The crisis of young adulthood concerns intimacy vs. isolation, and if resolved favorably results in the capacity to love. Love in its truest sense cannot evolve until this stage of life because it must be preceded by the forging of an identity, says Erikson, and it also requires a capacity for commitment. Whereas the earlier sex life was really a form of “genital combat,” intimacy can now transform that combat into closeness. In turn, this new capacity for loving sexual relations makes the need for sex less obsessive.
The crisis of the middle years, which begins around forty, centers on generativity vs. stagnation, and results in the ability to care if resolved favorably. At this stage a widening concern with the younger generation is necessary in some form if development is to continue. “Generativity” means becoming more responsible for younger adults, besides one’s own children; and it also relates to products, ideas, and works of art.
“Adult man is so constituted as to need to be needed lest the suffer the mental deformation self-absorption, in which he becomes his own infant and pet,” states Erikson. Teaching is a perfect example of generativity, he says. Teaching also illustrates the way in which the life stages interlock within a total life cycle: By lubricating the turning wheel of the generations, it benefits and connects the adult, the child, and the culture.
The eighth stage of life is the culmination of everything that has preceded. This final crisis pits ego integrity against despair, and if resolved successfully leads to wisdom. Fortified by matured judgment, the wise man is able to accept his “one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions.” Despite being well aware of varied lifestyles, he defends the dignity of his own.
“Only such integrity can balance the despair of the knowledge that a limited life is coming to a conscious conclusion, only such wholeness can transcend the petty disgust of feeling finished and passed by,” says Erikson. Because he sees the life cycle as a circular, interlocking bond between the generations, the successful resolution of this final crisis is of vital importance. Infantile trust, the first ego strength, depends on adult integrity—the last ego strength.
As they rotate, then, the generations nourish and enrich each other. Or at least they should. In fact, however, this reciprocal enrichment can exist only when a culture respects the old as much as the young.
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