Analyzing Erikson's Theories Of Psychosocial Development

Erik Erikson was born in Germany in 1902 and died in 1994. He never knew his father and therefore, was raised by his mother and stepfather (Erikson 2001). Many think that never knowing his father is what lead Erikson on the path of psychology. In 1933, he became a teacher in the US at Harvard Medical School and “practiced child psychoanalysis privately” (Erikson 2001). It was around this time he developed his point of view in psychology. One of the reasons why people think he was so influential was that he could see things from a different perspective. Erikson “straddled many boundaries: artist and scientist, clinician and theorist, ethnographer, psychologist and historian, European and American” (Douvan 1997). He was able to see flaws other …show more content…
Psychosocial development can be defined as “the approach that encompasses changes in our interactions with an understanding of one another, as well as in our knowledge and understanding of ourselves as members of society” (Feldman 1999). What this means is that our personality and understanding of the world change based on the people we meet and how we interact with them, along with how we fit into society. As I mentioned earlier, Erikson, unlike Freud, believes these changes happen throughout life. Erikson developed eight different stages to explain what kind of conflicts we go through and some possible positive and negative outcomes. These stages are something everyone goes through in the same order and around the same time. He said that “each stage presents a crisis or conflict that the individual must resolve” (Feldman 1999). In other words, there is a problem in each stage and depending on how we deal with it, there is a positive or negative outcome. Erikson goes onto say that the conflicts may never be fully resolved, but they have to be dealt with sufficiently enough in order to move onto the next stage. The eight stages …show more content…
role diffusion (Feldman 1999). “This is a major stage in development where the child has to learn the roles he will occupy as an adult” (McLeod 2008). This means that this is the time for the adolescence to find out who they are. This goes along with picking a college, a major, and a career. The expectation is that everyone should have had a positive outcome and can easily pick a career. The positive outcome being the “awareness of uniqueness of self” and who you are as a person (Feldman 1999). The negative outcome is the “inability to identify appropriate roles in life (Feldman 1999). This can be shown when a person in college is an undeclared major or keeps changing majors. This is also the time to experiment and find out what your passions are and who you are. The biggest negative outcome is an identity crisis (McLeod 2008). That is the biggest conflict a person faces in this stage. An identity crisis can lead to having no idea who they are, as a person or how they fit into the