Environment effects on Lifespan
Development
Erikson’s Stages of Personality
Development
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Trust vs. Mistrust
Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt
Initiative vs. Guilt
Industry vs. Inferiority
Identity vs. Role Confusion
Intimacy vs. Isolation
Generativity vs. Stagnation
Integrity vs. Despair
Levinson’s take
• Create adult manner of working and living
independently
• Re-Evaluating Start into adult life
• Working towards ones goals and feeling like a full
member of the adult generation
• Mid-life re-evaluation and transition
• Devotion to generative endeavors that live beyond
one’s lifespan
• Seeing purpose in one’s life at old age may make the
difference between living with satisfaction and merely
staying alive
Meaning of Life
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To have a meaningful life
Pleasure principle alone, or something more?
Consideration of future generations
Establishing a legacy through contributions
that live beyond oneself
• Truth seeking, personal exploration
• Personal growth through the spectrum of
experience from painful to blissful
Self Realization
• Coming into knowing of what you are capable of,
understanding your potential
• Can occur in differing areas of knowledge or life,
as in art and science
• Much of our potential lies dormant, as we
experience life depending on what we are doing
and in what environment we us that potential in
different ways and develop differently
• When born a person has the potential to become
a thousand people but always dies as just one.
Self Actualization
• Maslow’s hierarchy of motives in order are
biology, safety, love and belongings, selfesteem, and self-actualization.
• Self-actualization is the process of becoming
ones full potential
• Jung called it “Individuation” which is to
realize potential in a way that enhances a
persons unique traits and does no contradict
their core values and beliefs
Environment
• Cosmic – the reality we are embedded in, questions of God, alien
life forms, and the reality of mass extinction and mortality. Ethics,
Unity
• Global – where the drama of the human species takes place
• Habitat (where do you habitually visit? What are your boundaries –
what counts as an adventure. Distant land or novel experience.)
• Personal – where you currently reside, under current physical
circumstance
• Conscious – what you are aware of, drives conscious action, must
be developed into higher forms, may not be consistent with reality.
Isolated.
• Various inner levels both psychological and biological for instance
the sub conscious and the drama that plays out between micro
organisms inside our bodies and our individual cells – all the way
down to the quantum level and back to the cosmic.
Elements of Environment
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Mater and Energy (asbestos, E.L.F. waves)
Time and Place
Sensory Information
Past Experience, Future Projection
Role within environment, purpose
Additional actors and relationship roles
Give and take change, evolution
Entropic vs Generative
Cosmic, Worldly, Habitat, Personal
Sensory Register
Limbic System
Bad vs Good Environment
Stresses
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Large financial debts
Career, Marriage, and Parenthood
Day to day survival
Politics, War, Crime, Violence
Lots of minor financial debts
Health issues, impairment, disability
Pressures to achieve, high expectations
Any crisis from family death to tornados
Environment and Persona
Environments effect on Personality
• Our persona is an adaptive mask we create in
reaction to our environment
• Persona consists of the collection of
personality traits that are currently present
• This reflects internal states of emotion, and
general attitudes and beliefs
• It is the embodiment of our activity in the
world
Choosing a Persona
• Our base reaction to an environment or
stimulus creates instinctive personas and
actions
• Using higher awareness we choose to adopt a
more effective persona
• Our lower conscious may adopt predatory,
victim, and other destructive personas,
especially if the person exists in a state of
unbalance – in which environment plays a role
Interacting with Environment
• As the environment works to influence us, so we influence the
environment
• Just like people environment can be a generative or stagnant. A
banquet hall can be a place of family feasts or be filled with dirty
dishes and bugs
• As human beings we posses the ability to realize the potential in
our environment and shape it towards what lies in our minds eye
• So the person who see’s their potential as a great chef may adopt
the persona needed to see a great project through as the banquet
hall is restored
• With the banquet hall restored the environment is now able to
bring out the best in the people it houses. Had the person restoring
it bought the hall and then given up half way the environment
would have a totally different effect. Even while the owner is away.
Karma vs. Revenge
• Junctures in development take place in an environment
• Earl’s lifestyle choices lead him to becoming a petty career criminal,
eventually he gets hit by a car
• Added to the hospital environment is the television which Earl is
watching. This is how he learns about the concept of Karma which
changes his life; in an alternate episode he instead hears about
revenge from the TV. and adopts it as a lifestyle.
• Good Earl, makes undoing the wrongs he has done the purpose of
his life and it changes for the better. Bad Earl decides to get revenge
by shaving his ex wife's head bald and later she kills him by hitting
him with the car.
• Manageable aspects and involuntary aspects, such as the
perspective and spirit we approach life's challenges, to factors in
the physical environment that we can add, remove, or change in
order to increase overall success in life.