Basic Trust vs Mistrust: The earliest basic trust is established during the oral sensory stage and is demonstrated by the infant in its capacity to sleep peacefully. To take nourishment comfortably and to excrete relaxingly. Each day, as its wakeful hours increase, the infant becomes more familiar with the sensual experiences, and their familiarity coincides with a sense of feeling good. Daily routines, consistency and continuity in the infant's environment provide the earliest basis for a sense of psychosocial identity. Through continuity of experiences with adults, the infant learns to rely on them and trust them. Such assurance must counterbalance the negative counterpart of basic trust--namely basic mistrust. The proper ratio of trust and mistrust result in the ascendance of hope.
The foundation of hope relies on the infant's initial relations with trustworthy maternal parents, who are responsive to its needs and provide such satisfying experiences as tranquility, nourishment and warmth.The first stage of life is the stage of numinous ritualization. That is, the baby's sense of the hallowed presence of the mother, and the mother's "recognizing" him. Lack of recognition leads to a sense of separation and abandonment.
Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt: During the second stage of life, the child learns what is expected of it, what its obligations and privileges are and what limitations are placed upon it. The child's striving for new and more activity oriented experiences places a dual demand upon it: self-control and acceptance of control from others. To tame the child, adults will use the human propensity of shame· Excessive shamefulness will induce the child to be shameless, or force it to get away from things by being secretive, sneaky and sly.
A sense of self-control provides the child with a lasting feeling of good will and provide: however, a sense of loss of self-control can cause a lasting feeling of shame and doubt. The virtue of will emerges during the second stage of life. Will is the ever-increasing strength to make free choices, to decicie, to exercise self-restraint and to apply oneself. Erikson called the ritualization of this stage judicious, because the child begins to judge itself and others and to differentiate between right and wrong.
Initiation vs Guilt: The third psychosocial stage of life is that of initiative, an age of expanding mastery and responsibility. Purpose is the virtue that ascends this stage. The major activity in playing, and purpose results from playing, explanations, attempts, failures and experiments with toys. This stage is characterized by dramatic ritualization, where the child imitates adults, or pretends to be someone else. The negative counterpart is impersonation, where the individual presents an image that does not represent the true personality.
Industry vs Inferiority: In this stage the child learns to control its exuberant imagination and settle down to formal education. lt develops a sense of industry and learns the reward of perseverance and diligence. The child may develop a sense of inferiority, if it is, or is made to feel it is unable to master the tasks that it undertakes.
The virtue of competence emerges during this stage. A sense of competence is achieved by applying oneself to work and completing tasks. It is the age of formal ritualization, learning to do things in their proper way. The distorted form is formalism-repetition of meaningless formalities and empty rituals.
Identity vs Identity Confusion: During adolescence the individual begins to sense a feeling of his or her own identity, a feeling that one is a unique human being and yet prepared to fit into some meaningful role in society. This is a time when one wishes to define what one is at present and what one wants to be in the future. It is a time for making vocational plans. The activating inner agent in identity formation is the ego in its conscious and unconscious aspects. The ego has the capacity to select and integrate talents, aptitudes, and skills in identification with like minded people, and in adaptation to the social environment and to maintain its defences against threats and anxiety, as it learns to decide what impulses, needs, and roles are most appropriate and effective. All of these ego-selected characteristics , are integrated and assembled by the ego to form ones psychosocial identity. During this stage, it is likely, that an individual may suffer from a confusion of roles or identity confusion.
This state can cause one to feel isolated, empty, anxious and indecisive. The term identity crisis refers to the necessity to resolve the transitory failure to form a stable identity, or a confusion of roles. Identity crisis is important because, the whole future of the individual is dependent on it. The development of a negative identity is also disturbing. It is the sense of processing a set of potentially bad or unworthy characteristics. One way of dealing with negative crisis is to project the bad characteristics onto others. Such projection, however, can lead to a lot of social pathology. The virtue of fidelity develops at this stage. Fidelity is the foundation upon which a continuous sense of identity is formed. The ritualization concurrent with the adolescent stage is that of ideology. ldeologyis the solidarity or conviction that incorporates ritualizations from previous life stages into a coherent set of ideas and ideals. The perversion of the ideology ritualization that may occur is totalism.
Totalism is the fanatic and exclusive preoccupation with what seems to be unquestionably right.
Intimacy vs Isolation: In this stage, young adults seek relationships in intimacy, young adults seek relationships in intimacy, partnerships and affiliations and be prepared to develop the necessary strengths to fulfill these commitments despite the sacrifices they may have to make. The hazard of intimacy stage is isolation, which is the avoidance of relationships because one is unwilling to conmmit oneself to intimacy. The virtue of love comes into being during the intimacy stage of development. Although love is apparent in earlier stages, the development of true intimacy transpires only after the age of adolescence.
Although ones individual identity is maintained in a joint intimacy relationship, one's ego strength is dependent upon the mutual partner who is prepared to share in the rearing of children, the productivity, and the ideology of their relationship. The ritualization of this stage is the affiliative, a sharing together of work, friendship and love.The corresponding ritualization of this stage is elitism, which is expressed by the formation of exclusive groups that are a form of communal narcissm.
Generativity vs Stagnation: This stage of generativity is characterized by the concern with what is generated-progeny, products, ideas and so forth, and the establishing and setting forth of guidelines for upcoming generations. When generativity is weak or not given expression, the personality regress and takes on a sense of impoverishment and stagnation.
The virtue of care develops during this stage. Care is expresses by one' s concern for others, by wanting to take care of those who need it and to share one's knowledge and experience with them. The ritualization of this stage is the generational which is the ritualization of roles in which the adult acts as a transmitter of ideal values to the young. Distortion of the generational ritualization is expressed by the ritualism of authoritism. Authoritism is the seizure of authority incompatible with care.
Integrity vs Despair: Integrity is a state one reaches after having taken care of things and people, product, and ideas and having adapted to the successes and failures of existence. They perceive that their life has some order and meaning within a large order. He or she preserves with dignity a personal style of life and defends it from potential threats. This style of life and the integrity of culture thusbecome the "patrimony of the soul."
The essential counterpart of integrity is a certain despair over the vicissitudes of the individual life cycle, as well as over social and historical conditions. Wisdom is the virtue that develops out of the encounter of integrity and despair in the last stage of life. The ritualization of the old age may be called integral; this is reflected in the wisdom of the ages. A corresponding rituation Erikson suggests is sapientism: "the unwise pretense of being wise."
New Conception of The Ego
Erikson endowed the ego with a number of qualities that go far beyond any previous psychoanalytic conception of the ego. The kind of ego that Erikson described may be called the creative ego, although he did not use the word. It can and does find creative solutions to the new problems that beset it at each stage of life. It knows at each stage to use a combination of inner readinnes and outer opportunity and does so with vigour and even a sense of joy. When thwarted, the ego reacts with renewed effort instead of giving up. The ego appears to be immensely robust and resilient. The power of recovery is inherent in young ego. The ego thrives on conflict an crisis. It is the master and not the slave of the id, the external world and superego, though the ego is vulnerable, erects irrational defences, and is a victim of the devastating consequences of trauma, anxiety and guilt. But Erikson says that even under stressful conditions, the ego is usually capable of dealing effectively with its problems with some help from the psychotherapist.
Eriksons conception of ego was a very socialized and historical one. In addition to the genetic physiological and anatomical factors that help to determine the nature of the individual ego. There are also important historical and cultural influendes. It is this placing of the ego in a cultural and historical context- a space-time frame- that is Erikson's one of the most creative contributions to the ego theory.
Evaluation
Eriksons current status as a thinker, scholar, teacher and writer is a very prestigious one not only within the academic and professional circles with which he is associated but also in the world at large. Eriksons writings are free of adverse critism. Erikson's reputation among the psychologists drives almost entirely from his account of psychosocial development throughout the span of life from infancy to senility, in particular his concept of identity and identity crisis. Erikson is also greatly admired for his acute observations and sensible interpretations, for the literary merits of his writings, and for his deep compassion for everything human.
Erikson has been criticized for his overly optimistic view of humans. He has been reproached for writirg down the Freudian theory by concectrating on rhe strengths of the ego, the rational and the conscious at the expense of the id, the irrational and the unconscious. Erikson's formulations regarding psychosocial development must be evaluated in terms of the evidence, pros and cons and not in terms of their deviations from or agreement with any other theory.
A more subtle type of allegation charges Erikson with supporting the status quo
when he said that the individual must learn to confor or adjust to the institutions of thesociety in which he of she grows up. Actually, Erikson says that the people must find their identity within the potentials of their society, while their development must mesh with the requirements of the society else suffer the consequences.
A criticism with more merit than the foregoing ones focuses on the quality of the
quality of the empirical foundations upon which the theory is based. No one can question the tremendous variety of observational data that Erikson assembled. He observed the play of normal children under standardized conditions. He made first hand observations of two Indian cultures and expanded in detail the lives of two historical figures Luther and Gandhi.
Observation and measurement should lead one to controlled experimentation. This Erikson did not do. James Marcia provided a beginning. He developed a widely used measure of identity status in the adolescents and young adults. Orlofsky offered an interview based analysis of intimacy statuses. His interviews concern the prescence and depth of relationships with friends of the same sex and the opposite sex. Cross-cultural studies were also done of Erikson's constructs by Ochse and Plug(l986), Whitbourne and others (1992).
Summary
Erik Erikson's psychosocial theory, developed within a psychoanalytic framework, emphasizes the importance of ego psychology, developmental change throughout the life-scale and understanding personality, against the background of social and historical forces. Erikson regards the ego as an autonomous personality structure; his theory focuses on ego qualities that emerge at various developmental periods.
Erikson asserts that ego development proceeds through a series of universal stages. Each stage in the life cycle has an optimal time to emerge.The sequential unfolding of these life stages is a function of the individual's biological maturation interacting with his expanding social radius. In Erikson's view, eight psychosocial stages characterize the human life cycle. Each is marked by a particular kind of a crisis on its turning point in the persons life. The eight stages depicted in terms of the essential psychosocial conflicts associated with each are as follows:
- Basic trust vs Mistrust
- Autonomy vs Shame and Doubt
- Initiative vs Guilt
- Industry vs Inferiority
- Ego Identity vs Role Confusion
- Intimacy vs Isolation
- Generativity vs Stagnation
- Ego Integrity vs Despair
The individual's personality is determined by the resolution of these conflicts.
