overview

• Erik Erikson, the person who coined the term identity crisis
• post-Freudian theory extended Freud’s infantile devel opmental stages into adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Erikson suggested that at each stage a specific psychosocial struggle contributes to the formation of per sonality.
• From adolescence on, that struggle takes the form of an identity crisis— a turning point in one’s life that may either strengthen or weaken personality.
• he used Freudian theory as the foundation for his life-cycle approach to personality,
• Erikson placed more emphasis on both social and historical influences
• Erikson held that our ego is a positive force that creates a self-identity, a sense of “I.” As the center of our personality, our ego helps us adapt to the various conflicts and crises of life and keeps us from losing our individuality to the leveling forces of society.
• Erikson saw the ego as a partially unconscious organizing agency that synthesizes our present experiences with past self identities and also with anticipated images of self
• ego as a person’s ability to unify experiences and actions in an adaptive manner
• three interrelated aspects of ego: the body ego, the ego ideal, and ego identity
• body ego refers to experiences with our body; a way of seeing our physical self as different from other people. We may be satisfied or dissatisfied with the way our body looks and functions, but we recognize that it is the only body we will ever have
• ego ideal represents the image we have of ourselves in comparison with an established ideal; it is responsible for our being satisfied or dissatisfied not only with our physical self but with our entire personal identity
• Ego identity is the image we have of ourselves in the variety of social roles we play.
• Although inborn capacities are important in personality development, the ego emerges from and is largely shaped by society.
• In European American societies, orality and anality are often considered undesirable traits or neurotic symptoms
• pseudospecies that is, an illusion perpetrated and perpetu ated by a particular society that it is somehow chosen to be the human species
• e ego develops throughout the various stages of life accord ing to an epigenetic principle, a term borrowed from embryology, implies a step-by-step growth of fetal organs
• One stage emerges from and is built upon a previous stage, but it does not replace that earlier stage. This epigenetic development is analogous to the physical development of children, who crawl before they walk, walk before they run, and run before they jump.
• Epigenesis means that one characteristic develops on top of another in space and time