FREE ESSAY ON ERIK ERIKSON

ERIK ERIKSON

Erik Homberger Erikson was born in 1902 near Frankfort, Germany to Danish parents. Erik
studied art and a variety of languages during his school years, rather than science
courses such as biology and chemistry. He did not prefer the atmosphere that formal
schooling produced so instead of going to college he traveled around Europe, keeping a
diary of his experiences. After a year of doing this, he returned to Germany and enrolled
in art school. After several years, Erickson began to teach art and other subjects to
children of Americans who had come to Vienna for Freudian training. He was then admitted
into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1933 he came to the U.S. and became Boston's
first child analyst and obtained a position at the Hayvard Medical School. Later on, he
also held positions at institutions including Yale, Berkeley, and the Menninger
Foundation. Erickson then returned to California to the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto and later the Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco,
where he was a clinician and psychiatric consultant.
Erickson's interests were spread over a wide area. He studied combat crises in troubled
American soldiers in World War II, child-rearing practices among the Sioux in South
Dakota and the Yurok along the Pacific Coast, the play of disturbed and normal children,
the conversations of troubled adolescent suffering identity crises, and social behavior
in India. Erickson was also constantly concerned with the rapid social changes in America
and wrote about issues such as the generation gap, racial tensions, juvenile delinquency,
changing sexual roles, and the dangers of nuclear war. Erikson proposed that people grow
through experiencing a series of crises. They must achieve trust, autonomy, initiative,
competence, their own identity, productivity, integrity, and acceptance.
"Erikson's main contribution was to bridge the gap between the theories of psychoanalysis
on the problems of human development, which emphasize private emotions, and the broader
social influences that bear upon the individual. He was a strong proponent of the concept
that social environment plays a major role in the development of personality. Going
beyond the of a child's early life, Erikson concentrated on broader issues of peer
culture, school environment, and cultural values and ideals. This led him to study the
period of adolescence, in which he documented the interaction of a person's inner
feelings and impulses with the world that surrounds the person." 
Erikson developed eight stages of human development. Briefly I would describe all eight
my I will concentrate on stages five and six which are adolescence and young adulthood.
Myer describes the stages in the following manner. Stage one occurs during the first year
This stage is called infancy (trust vs. mistrust) during this stage if needs are
dependably met, infants develop a sense of basic trust. The second stage is called the
toddler stage (autonomy vs. shame and doubt). This stage occurs while the baby is two
years old, in this stage toddlers learn to exercise will do things for themselves, or
they doubt their abilities. The third stage is called the preschooler between the ages of
three and five (initiative vs. guilt). During this stage preschoolers learn to initiate
tasks and carry out plans, or they feel guilty about efforts to be independent. The
fourth stage is called the elementary school stage (competence vs. inferiority) from the
ages of six through puberty. During this stage children learn the pleasure of applying
themselves to tasks, or they feel inferior. 
In the fifth stage is the adolescence stage (identity vs. role confusion) this stage
occurs during the ages of thirteen years into twenties. The sixth stage is called young
adulthood (intimacy vs. isolation) during the ages of around 21 through 40 young adults
struggle to form close relationships and to gain capacity for intimate love, or they feel
socially isolated. The seventh stage is called middle adulthood (generativity vs.
stagnation) during the ages of 41 through about 60 the middle-aged discover a sense of
contributing to the world, such as through family and work, or they may feel a lack of
purpose. During late adulthood ages 60 and up, (integrity vs. despair) during this stage
when reflecting on his or her life, the older adult may feel a sense of satisfaction or
failure. 
According to Dr. C. George Boeree "Erikson is a Freudian ego-psychologist. This means
that he accepts Freud's ideas as basically correct, including the more debatable ideas
such as the Oedipal complex, and accepts as well the ideas about the ego that were added
by other Freudian loyalist such as Heinz Hartmann and, of course, Anna Freud. However,
Erikson is much more society and culture- oriented than most Freudians, as you might
except from someone with his anthropological interest, and he often pushes the instincts
and the unconscious practically out of the picture. Perhaps because of this, Erikson is
popular among Freudians and non-Freudians alike." 
"According to Erikson, personality develops in steps determined by human organism's
readiness to move toward, to be aware of, and to interact with a widening social world -
a world that begins with a dim image of mother and ends with an image of humankind."
Erikson's stages are very interesting; stages five and six are going to be describe in
detail in my paper. 
Stage five is adolescence, beginning with puberty and ending around 18 or 20 years old.
The task during adolescence is to achieve ego identity and avoid role confusion. It was
adolescence that interested Erikson first and most, and the patterns he saw here were the
bases for his thinking about all the other stages. Ego identity means knowing whom you
are and how you fit in to the rest of the society. It requires that you take all you've
learned about life and mold it into a unified self-image, one that your community finds
meaningful. 
There are a number of things that make things easier: First, we should have a mainstream
adult culture that is worthy of the adolescent's respect, one with good adult role models
and open lines of communication. Further, society should provide clear rites of passage,
certain accomplishments and rituals that help to distinguish the adult from the child. In
primitive and traditional societies, an adolescent boy may be asked to leave the village
for a period of time to live on his own, hunt some symbolic animal, or seek an
inspirational vision. Boys and girls may be required to go through certain test of
endurance, symbolic ceremonies, or educational events. In one way or another, the
distinction between the powerless, but irresponsible, time of childhood and the powerful
and responsible time of adulthood, is made clear. Without these things, we are likely to
see role confusion, meaning an uncertainty about one's place in society and the world
these things. When an adolescent is confronted by role confusion, Erikson said he or she
is suffering from an identity crisis. In fact, a common question adolescents in our
society ask is a straight-forward question of identity: "Who am I?"
One of Erikson's suggestions for adolescence in our society is the psychosocial
moratorium. He suggests you take a little "time-out". If you have money, go to Europe.
There is such a thing as too much "ego identity", where a person is so involved in a
particular role in a particular society or subculture that there is no room left for
tolerance. Erikson calls this maladaptive tendency fanaticism. A fanatic believes that
his way is the only way. Adolescents are of course known for their idealism, and for
their tendency to see things in black-and-white. These people will gather other around
them and promote their beliefs and life styles with regard to others' rights to disagree.
The lack of identity is perhaps more difficult still, and Erikson refers to the malignant
tendency here as repudiation. They repudiate their member in the world of adults and,
even more, they repudiate their need for an identity. Some adolescents allow themselves
to "fuse" with a group, especially the kind of group that is particularly eager to
provide the details of your identity: religious cults, militaristic organizations, groups
founded on hatred, groups that have divorced themselves from the painful demands of
mainstream society. They become involved in destructive activities, drugs, or alcohol, or
you may withdraw into their own psychotic fantasies. After all, being "bad" or "nobody"
is better than not knowing who you are. If one successfully negotiates this stage, one
will have virtue Erikson called fidelity. Fidelity means loyalty, the ability to live by
society standards despite their imperfections and incompleteness and inconsistencies.
"For adolescents not only help one another temporarily through much discomfort by forming
cliques and by stereotyping themselves, their ideals, and their enemies; they also
perversely test each other's capacity to pledge fidelity" 
Stage six is young adulthood, which last from about 18 to about 30. The ages in the adult
stages are much fuzzier than in the childhood stages, and people may differ dramatically.
The task is to achieve some degree of intimacy, as opposes to remaining in isolation.
Intimacy is the ability to be close to others, as a lover, a friend, and as a participant
in society. Because one has a clear sense of which one is , one no longer need to fear
"losing" oneself, as many adolescents do. The "fear of commitment" some people seem to
exhibit is an example of immaturity in this stage. This fear isn't always so obvious.
Many people today are always putting off the progress of their relationships. Neither
should the young adult need to prove him- or herself anymore. A teenage relationship is
often a matter of trying to establish identity through "couple-hood" Who am I? I'm his
girl friend. The young adult relationship should be a matter of two independent egos
wanting to create something larger than themselves. We intuitively recognize this when we
frown on a relationship between a young adult and a teenager: We see the potential for
manipulation of the younger member of the party by the older. Our society hasn't done
much for young adult, either. The emphasis on careers, the isolation of urban living, the
splitting apart of relationships because of our need for mobility, and the general
impersonal nature of modern life prevent people from naturally developing their intimate
relationships. Erikson calls the maladaptive form promiscuity, referring particularly to
the tendency to become intimate too free, too easily, and without any depth to ones
intimacy. The malignancy he call exclusion, which refers to the tendency to isolate from
love, friendship and community, and to develop a certain hatefulness in compensation for
one's loneliness. If one gets through this stage Erikson believes that one has the
psychosocial strength to love. "A human being should be potentially able to accomplish
mutuality of genital orgasm, but he should also be so constituted as to bear a certain
amount of frustration in the matter without undue regression wherever emotional
preference or considerations of duty and loyalty call for it" 
Erikson left the field of psychology with great achievements he was a great writer a
great doctor and a great man. He left behind a great legacy. "If the relation of father
and son dominated the last century, then this one is concerned with the self-made man
asking himself what he is making of himself." - Erik H. Erikson, 1964
Bibliography
REFERENCES
Boeree C. G., Personality Theories 
Http://www.ship.edu/-cgboeree/erikson.html
Http://www.ship.edu/-cgboeree/persinto.html
Erikson H. E., Childhood and Society (1963)
Friedman J. L., Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (1999)
Hall E, Lamb M, Perlmutter M., Child Psychology Today 2nd ED. (1986) pg. 22-25
Http://www.geocities.com/heartland/6245/Erikson.html
Myer D., Exploring Psychology 3rd ED. (1996) pg. 93-96