[3] Erikson’s Psychological Approach (Kroger)

• Erik Erikson’s Writings

  • Phenomenon formation during adolescents
  • Based on but also diverged from Freud’s biologically based psychosexual orientation
  • Focuses on id and libidinal drivers to development
  • Ego and its adaptive capacities in the environment
  • Erikson saw others as interacting with and regulating ego
  • To provide context in which the self can find meaning and cohere
  • Recognized that personality development did not end in adolescence – continued to evolve throughout the life-span
• “Ego Identity”

  • The conflict between the needs of a man’s social group, biological organism, and his own development and family history
  • Breaking down personal meaning and life continuity
• Identity

  • Most defined by its absence or loss
• • Characteristics of Identity:
  • Identity is partly conscious and partly unconscious 
  • Partly Conscious → gives one’s life a feeling of sameness and continuity
  • Partly Unconscious → “Quality of unselfconscious living”; taken for granted by those in possession
  • Identity involves conflict
  • Identity has its own developmental period during adolescence and youth

  Identity is a generational issue → the parent providing a framework
• Identity formation

  • depends on the interplay between what a young person’s meaning to themselves and the meaning they appear to have from other significant people
  • A synthesis into a new configuration
  • Different from just “a sum of individual parts”
  • A process dependent on social response – how society “identifies the young individual”
  • Identity evolves through earlier stages of development (not just in adolescence)
• • The sense of “I” → emerges through trustful interplay between the child and the parent
• • Introjection → incorporation of another’s image of you; leads to more mature identity resolution
• Identification → the primary means that the self is structured; identifying what is liked from you
• “Epigenesis”

  • Identity development and personality change
  • “Upon” (epi) + “emergence” (genesis)
  • Negative Identity → A diametric contrast to all those of his own heritage
  • It may be better for troubled adolescents to become someone completely other to what they were in their childhood
  • Rather than try to fit the past into the present
• Erikson's 8 Stages of Psychosocial Development

  • Trust vs Mistrust →  hope
  • Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt → will
  • Initiative vs Guilt → purpose
  • Industry vs Inferiority → competence
  • Identity vs Role Confusion → fidelity
  • Intimacy vs Isolation → love
  • Generativity vs Stagnation → care
  • Integrity vs Despair → wisdom
• Trust vs Mistrust →  hope

  1. Development crisis of trust – based on Freud’s biological concern with early oral experience
  2. A rudimentary sense of ego identity is born
  3. From mutual regulation and interaction between care-taker and infant
  4. Instilled how to act in society
  5. An adaptive balance of neither complete trust nor complete mistrust
• Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt → will

  1. Development of autonomy (~2-3 years)
  2. A child’s increasing awareness of self through control of bodily functions and expressions – an experience of will
  3. Example: potty training, walking, saying “no”, learning the pronoun “I”
  4. Originating from a response to a social issue
  5. An adaptive balance of shame and autonomy
• Initiative vs Guilt → purpose

  1. The sense of being ‘on the make’ (preschool years)
  2. The ability to imagine
  3. Only through learning that one is does one learn what one is → births the possibility to initiate
  4. What kind of sex role to adopt
  5. A sense of purpose and ambition grows from the initiative
  6. Locomotion and language develop and are vital in finding out, organizing and influencing other’s sense of identity
  7. Kids teach each other things (limits, status quos, social norms)
• Industry vs Inferiority → competence

  1. Practicing skills & completing tasks in the anticipation of later adult life (primary school)
  2. The feeling of competence and achievement are the goals
  3. Only through an initiative of one’s autonomous self which trusts the social milieu
  4. Wisdom in social response or how they will react to your actions
  5. The positive identification with those who know things and know how to do things
• Identity vs Role Confusion → fidelity

  1. “Fully developed genitality is not a goal to be pursued in isolation”
  2. Identity incorporates yet transcends the endocrinological revolution of puberty to include psychosocial issues
  3. Finding a ‘feeling of reality’ in socially approved roles
  4. Fidelity is the essence of identity
  5. To become faithful and committed to some ideological worldview
  6. To find a cause worthy of one's energy and reflection
• Intimacy vs Isolation → love

  1. Far more than just sexual fulfillment
  2. “Intimacy is the ability to fuse your identity with somebody else’s without fear that you’re going to lose something yourself”
  3. The desire to commit oneself to a relationship even with personal sacrifice
  4. Not possible until issues of identity are well-resolved
  5. Attempts to find one’s identity through merging with another
  6. Isolation is the alternative – creating conflict at this stage
  7. Can even lead to repeated attempts and failures from them seeking intimacy from improbable partners
• Generativity vs Stagnation → care

  1. During adulthood, we must take a caring role in society
  2. For one's offspring, productions, social contributions, and future generations
  3. Generativity cannot be met only with parenting; it can also be in the desire of the autonomous ‘I’ as a part of the intimate ‘we’ to contribute to the present and future well-being of others
  4. The willingness to engage in acts that better lives for the younger generations and for long-term survival
  5. Stagnation or self-absorption is the counterpart of generavity
  6. Personal comfort becomes the primary motivator for action
• Integrity vs Despair → wisdom

  1. Old age
  2. Integrity is the acceptance of one’s life cycle as something that is necessary with no substitutions
  3. The ability to accept one’s own morality is a good gauge of integrity
  4. The fear of death diminishes with good integrity and a lack of regrets
  5. Wisdom of mature judgment and reflection of one’s own “accidental” place in the world
  6. Despair is the counterpoint to integrity
  7. The feeling that the remaining time of their life is too short to try and make it better