ERIK H. ERIKSON
PSYCHOSOCIAL STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT
Objectives:
1. To study the key ingredients of Erik
Erikson’s Stages of development;
2. To understand further the meaning of
ego, identity crises, and the role of the
environment on the individual; and
3. To be aware of the roots of Erikson’s
ideas on psychosocial stages.
Erikson was of mixed Danish and Jewish parentage. After his
parents' divorce, he had no contact with his father.
After completing his education, he wandered around Europe,
unsure of what career to follow.
He tried
painting and
wood carving
and accepted
an offer to
teach art at a
private school
in Vienna for
children whose
parents were
undergoing
analysis at
Freud's
Psychoanalitic
Insititute.
Known as the Father of
Psychosocial Development
When he
came to
America, he
needed to
redefine his
identity as an
immigrant.
Born in Frankfurt, Germany in June 15, 1902
He concluded that the quest for
identity is the major theme in life.
Essential to Erikson's
theory is the development
of the ego and the ego's
ability to deal with a
series of crises or
potential crises
throughout the
individual's lifespan.
ERIKSON’S 8 STAGES
OF DEVELOPMENT
INTRODUCTION TO ERIKSON’S
8 STAGES
Each stage is characterized by a
different conflict that must be resolved
by the individual.
When the environment makes new
demands on people, the conflicts
arise.
There are 2 ways in coping w/ each crisis, an
adaptive or maladaptive way
When each crisis is resolved, a person will
have sufficient strength to deal w/ the next
stages of development.
STAGE 1: ORAL-SENSORY
Age: Infancy to 12-18 mos.
Conflict: Trust vs Mistrust
Important Event: Feeding
Description:
Trust and mistrust is established in the feeding situation. Trust
allows an infant to let the mother out of sight. The mother's sensitive
care to the baby's needs lays the groundwork for the child's sense of
self.
Positive Outcome: Familiarity, comfort, and nourishment are met.
Negative Outcome: Children will see the world as unfriendly
and unpredictable, they will have trouble developing close
relationships. They become suspicious, fearful, and mistrusting of
their surroundings.
Virtue of Hope
- the belief that their needs
will be met and their wishes
can be attained
Example:
Babies will begin to understand that
objects and people exist even when
they cannot see them.
STAGE 2: MUSCULAR-ANAL
Age: Toddler period 1 to 2 years
Conflict: Autonomy vs Doubt
Important Event: Toilet Training
Description:
Toddlers try to use their developing muscles to do everything
themselves - to walk, to feed, and dress.
Positive Outcome: Children must take more responsibility for their
own feeding, toileting, & dressing. Parents must avoid overprotection.
Negative Outcome: If parents set too many limits or too few,
children become compulsive about controlling themselves. Fear of
losing self-control may fill them with inhibitions, doubt, shame and
loss of self-esteem.
Virtue of Will
- children learn to make
their own decisions and to
use self-restraint
Example:
In this stage, children
begin to assume important
responsibilities for selfcare like feeding, toileting
& dressing.
STAGE 3: LOCOMOTOR
Age: Early Childhood 2 to 6 years
Conflict: Initiative vs Guilt
Important Event: Independence
Description:
Children in this stage are eager for responsibility. They continue
to be assertive and like to take initiative.
Positive Outcome: Children must learn to accept w/o guilt. They must
be guilt free when using their imagination.
Negative Outcome: When unresolved they become guilt-ridden
and repressed. They may become adults who inhibit their impulses
and are self-righteously intolerant of others.
Virtue of Purpose
- the courage to envision and pursue
valued goals, uninhibited by the defeat
of guilt and fear of punishment.
Example:
A 4 yr-old passing tools to a
parent who is fixing a
bicycle.
STAGE 4: LATENCY
Age: Elementary & Middle School
yrs. 6 to 12 years
Conflict: Industry vs Inferiority
Important Event: School
Description:
The issue to be resolved has to do with a child's capacity for
productive work - a child learns to count, read, and use computers.
Positive Outcome: It is essential for children to discover
pleasure in being productive.
Negative Outcome: If they feel inadequate, they may regress to
an earlier level of development - lack of self-initiative; if they become
too industrious, they may neglect relationships with other people and
become workaholics.
Virtue of
Competence
- a view of the self
as able to master
and complete
tasks
Example:
Children want to do productive work on their
own.
STAGE 5: ADOLESCENCE
Age: Adolescence 12 to 18 yrs
Conflict: Identity vs Role Confusion
Important Event: Peer Relationships
Description:
Adolescents are in search of an identity that will lead them to
adulthood. They make a strong effort to answer “Who am I”?
Adolescents‘ searching for identity make them susceptibility to fads,
cults, and gang loyalties to resolve their crisis of identify vs confusion.
Love is another avenue toward identity. Erikson believed that males
cannot achieve true intimacy until they have achieved a stable identity.
Females, he thought, achieve intimacy before identity because girls put
their identity aside as they define themselves by the man they will marry.
Positive Outcome: Adolescents must
make a conscious search for identity.
Negative Outcome: role confusion,
feelings of inadequacy, isolation and
indecisiveness
Virtue of Fidelity: sustained loyalty, faith,
or a sense of belongingness to friends and
companions. Fidelity is not only the capacity
to trust others and oneself but also the
capacity to be trustworthy.
Example: Adolescents attempt to establish their
own identities & see themselves as separate from
their parents.
STAGE 6: YOUNG ADULTHOOD
Age: Young Adulthood
19 to 40 yrs
Conflict: Intimacy vs Isolation
Important Event: Love
Relationships
Description:
The most important events are love relationships. Intimacy
refers to one’s ability to relate to another human being on a deep,
personal level.
Positive Outcome: The young adult must be willing to be open
and committed to another individual.
Negative Outcome: Those unable or unwilling to share themselves
with others suffer a sense of loneliness or isolation.
Virtue of Love
- a young adult with a strong
identity is ready to fuse it with that
of another person;
- mutuality of devotion, involves
commitment, sacrifice, and
compromise
Example:
Sharing oneself with others on a
moral, emotional, and sexual
level; marriage
STAGE 7: MIDDLE ADULTHOOD
Age: Middle adulthood 40 to
65 years
Conflict: Generativity vs Stagnation
Important Event: Parenting
Description:
Generativity refers to the adult’s ability to care for another person.
Positive Outcome: To have & nurture children and or become
involved with future generations.
Negative Outcome: Too much stagnation can result in selfindulgence or even in physical or psychological sickness.
Virtue of Care
- a commitment to
take care of the
persons, the products,
and the ideas one has
learned to care for.
Example:
Generativity is expressed
through activities like teaching
and mentorship; it also takes
the form of productivity or
creativity to further develop
personal identity.
STAGE 8: MATURITY
Age: 65 years to death
Conflict: Integrity vs Despair
Description:
Important Event: Reflection on and
acceptance of one’s life
Seeing order and meaning in their lives
Positive Outcome: The adult feels a sense of fulfillment about life
and accepts death as an unavoidable reality.
Negative Outcome: : People who do not achieve acceptance are
overwhelmed by despair, realizing that time is too short to seek other
roads to integrity; past lives are viewed as a series of
disappointments, failures and misfortunes.
Virtue of Wisdom
- accepting the life one has lived
without major regrets over what
could have been or what one
should have done differently. It
implies accepting one's death as
the inevitable end of a life lived
well as one knew how to live it.
Example:
A aged person may find it necessary to
reflect what they had accumulated
throughout life.
Critique on Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory
- Erikson has been criticized for his loose connections
of case studies and conclusions. His theory, like
Freud's, is difficult to support with empirical evidence.
- Some of his concepts are also hard to assess objectively
or to use as a basis for research; and there is no real
evidence that his stages unfold in the sequence he
proposes.
- Like Freud, Erikson too has been criticized for an
antifemale bias, since he uses the male as the norm for
healthy development.
- For Erikson, a decision not to fulfill the natural
procreative urge has serious consequences for
development. Thus he limits "healthy" development to
loving heterosexual relationships that produce
children. His exclusion of single, celibate, homosexual,
an other childless lifestyles has been criticized.
- His assertion that people establish their identity in
adolescence is too narrow. Other research shows that
the search for identity continues during adulthood.
- Furthermore, Erikson's view that childless people have
trouble achieving generativity is considered narrow by
many psychologists.
COMPARED WITH FREUD,
ERIKSON'S GOOD POINTS
1. Freud concentrated on the individual's instinctual drives and interest
in different parts of the body while Erikson emphasizes the child's
interactions with the environment.
2. Erikson felt that Freud's view of society was too negative because
Freud saw civilization as a source of discontent, an impediment to
biological drives.
3. Unlike Freud, Erikson's theory is more comprehensive and encompasses
the years from infancy to old age.
4. For Erikson, the course of development is reversible, meaning personality
structures built earlier in life can undo for better or worse. For Freud,
personality structures are fixed by the age of 5