Erik Erikson’s personality development theory

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Erik Erikson’s personality development theory among other approaches

Eric Erickson

Erik Erikson’s personality development theory states:

The society for the child is not antagonistic.
Personality develops from birth to death.
Personality develops through successive stages of life.
The stages of life, as the stages of personality development, are the same for everyone.
There are eight stages in human development.
A person can go through each stage of his development both safely and not.
The transition from one stage to the next is a personality crisis.
In a crisis, ego-identity is lost, the task of the psychotherapist is to return it.

Society for the child is not antagonistic

In the concept of psychoanalysis, I and society, Id and Super-Ego, are presented as hostile, antagonistic to each other. Erickson began to distinguish between rituals and ritualisms and argued that the relationship between the individual and society can be a relationship of cooperation that ensures the harmonious development of the individual. See →

Personality develops from birth to death

This is another departure from classical psychoanalysis, where personality development was described only as psychosexual development. However, personal development for Erik Erikson is a passive personal growth, where the main thing is not the achievement of certain peaks, but «agreement with oneself.»

Personality develops through successive stages of life

According to Erik Erickson, in the development of a personality there are certain obligatory and successive stages that everyone must go through in their development. As a paradigm of development, this is a ladder. Is this the only possible view of personality development? No. Other researchers believe that personality can develop both in the honeycomb type and in the crown type. See →

Stages of life, as stages of personality development, are the same for everyone

Erik Erikson’s theory is an epigenetic theory. Epigenesis is the presence of a holistic innate plan that determines the main stages of development. For a discussion of this, see →

There are eight stages in human development

According to Erickson, development continues throughout life, and each of the stages of development is marked by a conflict specific to it, the favorable resolution of which leads to the transition to a new stage:

The first stage is from birth to a year, the conflict between trust and distrust;
The second stage is from one to two years, the conflict between autonomy and doubt;
The third stage — from three to six years, the conflict between enterprise and inadequacy;
The fourth stage corresponds to Freud’s «latent period», the conflict between creativity and an inferiority complex;
The fifth stage is youth, identification of personality and confusion of roles;
The sixth stage is early adulthood, the conflict between intimacy and loneliness;
The seventh stage is late adulthood, the conflict of productivity and stagnation;
The eighth stage is the conflict of wholeness and hopelessness.

Favorable conflict resolutions are called «virtues». The names of the virtues, in order of their gradual acquisition: hope, will, purpose, confidence, fidelity, love, care, and wisdom. See details →

A person can go through each stage of his development both safely and not.

A successful passage is usually determined by how well a person went through the previous stages of his development, as well as by the well-being of the social situation. Wars, social crises and other blows of fate prevent a person from successfully passing the next stage of his life path.

Eric Erickson did not work with people who are actively engaged in personal growth and development, developing themselves according to a plan and consciously. Erickson described what happens in the spontaneous development of personality, including elements of personal degradation. And if a developed person can build himself consciously, be the author of his life, then with Erickson’s patients, the successful passage of the next stage only happened — either it didn’t happen, or they were lucky or not — and then, dear victims, you are referred to a psychotherapist. A psychotherapist helped a person build his next stage of life more actively and more consciously, although Erik Erickson never set himself the task of becoming a personal coach.

The transition from a stage to the next stage is a personality crisis.

The idea of development as a sequence of psychosocial crises is at least not obvious. Yes, at some stage in a person’s life there are alternative ways of development, and depending on his choice, personal development can turn out to be both positive and harmonious, and negative, with developmental disorders and disorders of the emotional, personal and cognitive spheres. A positive resolution of the crisis contributes to the formation of a positive neoplasm or a strong personality trait; negative — a destructive neoplasm that prevents the formation of ego-identity.

The question is, why should the presence of an important alternative in development be called a crisis? According to Wikipedia, a crisis is a turning point in which the inadequacy of the means to achieve goals gives rise to unpredictable problems. If in a situation of choice one uses inadequate means to achieve goals and generates unpredictable problems, then, indeed, every choice will turn out to be a crisis. Perhaps Eric Erickson’s clients turned out to be such people. But to formulate on this basis that for any person, including an intelligent and healthy one, the construction of a new stage in his life is a crisis — probably, there are not enough grounds. Moreover, it seems that such formulations are pathogenic, forming unreasonable anxieties about upcoming life events. See →

In a crisis, ego-identity is lost, the task of the psychotherapist is to return it.

For Erik Erickson, the main thing in a person’s life is to be in harmony with oneself, but at the same time develop. Ego-identity denotes the integrity of the developing personality; the identity and continuity of our Self, despite the changes that occur to us in the process of growth and development. «I’m evolving, but I’m the same.» See →