Erikson: Post-Freudian Theory

● Had many questions but few answers about his biological father.
● Chose to believe that he was the outcome of a sexual liaison between his mother
and an artistically gifted aristocratic Dane.
● Had difficulties accepting himself as either a Jew or a Gentile leading to identity
confusion.
● He coined the term identity crisis.
● Placed more emphasis on both social and historical influences.
● Full name: Erik H. Erikson (Erik Salomonsen, Erik Homburger Erikson, Erik
Homburger)
Biography
● June 15 1902 - May 12, 1994
● Erikson ventured away from home during late adolescence, adopting the life of a
wandering artist and poet for 7 years.
● A fortuitous event changed his life: he received a letter from his friend Peter Blos
inviting him to teach children in a new school in Vienna.
○ Anna Freud, who is one of the founders of the school, became his employer
and his psychoanalyst as well.
● Anna Freud told that he should stop fantasizing about his absent father, but Erikson
could not take this advice.
● Married Joan Serson, with her psychoanalytic background and her facility with the
English language, and became a valuable editor and occasional coauthor of
Erikson’s books.
○ Had 4 children: sons Kai, Jon, and Neil, and daughter Sue.
● Erikson’s search for identity took him through some difficult experiences during his
adult developmental stage. This stage requires a person to take care of children,
products, and ideas that they generated.
○ Erikson felt that he failed to take good care of his son Neil, who was born
with down syndrome.
○ Erikson placed Neil in an institution.
○ Lied to his children that Neil died at birth. Later told Kai, but the lie
continued for Jon and Sue.
○ Although Erikson’s mother’s lie distressed him greatly, he failed to
understand that his lie about Neil might later distress his other children.
○ Neil died at about age 20.
● Immigrated to the United States and changed his name from Homburger to Erikson.
This change was a crucial turning point in his life because it represented a retreat
from his earlier Jewish identification.
● First settled in Boston where he set up a modified psychoanalytic practice.
● Took a position at Yale in 1936, but 2 years later moved to the University of
California.
● Later lived with people of the Yurok nation in northern California, and these
experiences in cultural anthropology added to the richness and completeness of his
concept of humanity.
● 1950 - Erikson published Childhood and Society where he recognized that the
influence of psychological, cultural, and historical factors on identity was the
underlying element that held the various chapters together.
 ● Worked as a therapist at Austen Riggs.
● 1960 - Returned to Harvard and for the next 10 years, held the position of professor
of human development.
● Wrote Gandhi’s Truth--a book that won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book
Award.
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THE EGO IN POST-FREUDIAN THEORY

● Erikson held that our ego is a positive force that creates a self-identity, a sense of
“I”.
● Our ego helps us adapt to the various conflicts and crises of life and keeps us from
losing our individuality to the leveling forces of society.
● During childhood, the ego is weak, pliable and fragile; but by adolescence, it should
begin to take form and gain strength.
● It unifies personality and guards against indivisibility.
● Erikson saw the ego as a partially unconscious organizing agency that synthesizes
our present experiences with past self-identities and also with anticipated images
of self.
● He also defined the ego as a person’s ability to unify experiences and actions in an
adaptive manner.
● Identified three interrelated aspects of ego:
○ BODY EGO
■ Experiences with our body; a way of seeing our physical self as
different from other people.
■ It is the only body we will ever have.
○ EGO IDEAL
■ Image we have of ourselves in comparison with an established ideal.
■ Responsible for our being satisfied/dissatisfied not only with our
physical self but with our entire personal identity.
○ EGO IDENTITY
■ Image we have of ourselves in the variety of social roles we play.
● Alterations in these aspects can and do take place at any stage of life.

SOCIETY’S INFLUENCE
● Ego emerges from and is largely shaped by society.
● Ego exists as potential at birth, but it must emerge from within a cultural
environment.
○ Different societies, with their variations in child-rearing practices, tend to
shape personalities that fit the needs and values of their culture.
■ The Sioux nation resulted in “oral personalities” and unlimited
breast-feeding as foundation for the virtue of generosity. However,
Sioux parents quickly suppress biting, contributing to the child’s
fortitude and ferocity.
 ■ The Yurok nation resulted in “anal personalities” setting strict
regulations when it comes to eliminates of feces and urine.
■ European American societies, orality and anality are often
considered undesirable traits or neurotic symptoms. For Sioux and
Yurok nations, these traits are adaptive characteristics that help
both the individual and the culture.
○ The fact that European American culture views orality and anality as deviant
traits merely displays its own ethnocentric view of other societies.
■ Pseudospecies - an illusion perpetrated and perpetuated by a
particular society that it is somehow chosen to be the human
species.

EPIGENETIC PRINCIPLE
● Belief that the ego develops throughout the various stages of life according to an
epigenetic principle, a term borrowed from embryology.
● Epigenetic development implies a step-by-step growth of fetal organs.
● The embryo develops, or should develop, according to a predetermined rate and in
a fixed sequence.
● The ego follows this path, with each stage developing at its proper time.
○ One stage emerges from and is built upon a previous stage, but it does not
replace that earlier stage.
● Analogous to the physical development of children, who crawl before they walk,
walk before they run, and run before they jump. After they are mature enough to
jump, they still retain their ability to run, walk, and crawl.
● “Anything that grows has a ground plan, and that out of this ground plan the parts
arise, each part having its time of special ascendancy, until all parts have arisen to
form a functioning whole.”
● Epigenesis means that one characteristic develops on top of another in space and
time.

STAGES OF PSYCHOSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

● Comprehension of Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development requires
an understanding of several basic points:
○ Growth takes place according to the epigenetic principle.
○ In every stage of life, there is an interaction of opposites--a conflict
between a syntonic (harmonious) element and a dystonic (disruptive)
element. (e.g. trust vs mistrust)
○ The conflict between the dystonic and syntonic elements produces an ego
quality or ego strength--basic strength. (e.g. trust vs mistrust emerges
hope)
○ Too little basic strength at any one stage results in a core pathology for that
stage. (E.g. withdrawal instead of hope)
○ Although he referred to his eight stages as psychosocial stages, he never
lost sight of the biological aspect of human development.
○ Events in earlier stages do not cause later personality development. Ego
identity is shaped by a multiplicity of conflicts and events--past, present,
and anticipated.
 ○ During each stage, but especially from adolescence forward, personality
development is characterized by an identity crisis--a turning point, a crucial
period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential. During each
crisis, a person is especially susceptible to major modifications in identity,
either positive or negative. An identity crisis is not a catastrophic event but
rather an opportunity for either adaptive or maladaptive adjustment.

I. INFANCY
● A period encompassing approximately the first year of life and paralleling Freud’s
oral phase of development.
● A time of incorporation, with infants “taking in” not only through their mouth but
through their various sense organs as well.
○ E.g. infants take in visual stimuli through their eyes.
● As they take in food and sensory information, infants learn to either trust or
mistrust the outside world, a situation that gives them realistic hope.
● Infancy is marked by oral-sensory psychosexual mode--the psychosocial crisis of
basic trust vs basic mistrust, and is the basic strength of hope.

♥ ORAL-SENSORY MODE
● A phrase that includes infants’ principal psychosexual mode of adapting.
● Characterized by two modes of incorporation--receiving and accepting what is
given.
○ Infants can receive even in the absence of other people. (E.g. take in air
through their lungs and receive sensory data)
○ The second mode implies a social context. Infants not only must get, but
they also must get someone else to give.
♥ BASIC TRUST VERSUS BASIC MISTRUST
● Most significant interpersonal relations: primary caregiver (mother).
● If infants realize that their mother will provide food regularly, then they begin to
learn basic trust (syntonic). If their pattern of accepting things corresponds with
culture’s way of giving things, then infants learn basic trust.
● In contrast, infants learn basic mistrust (dystonic) if they find no correspondence
between their oral-sensory needs and their environment.
● Infants must develop both attitudes. Too much trust makes them gullible and
vulnerable, too little trust leads to frustration, anger, hostility, cynicism, or
depression.
● Erikson believed that some ratio of trust and mistrust is critical to people’s ability to
adapt.
○ He told Richard Evans that “when we enter a situation, we must be able to
differentiate how much we can trust, and how much we must mistrust, and I
use mistrust in the sense of a readiness for danger and an anticipation of
discomfort.
● The inevitable clash between this results in people’s first psychosocial crisis. If
people successfully solve this crisis, they acquire the basic strength of hope.
♥ HOPE: THE BASIC STRENGTH OF INFANCY
● Without the antithetical relationship between trust and mistrust, people cannot
develop hope.
 ● By having both painful and pleasurable experiences, infants learn to expect that
future distresses will meet with satisfactory outcomes.
● If infants do not develop sufficient hope, they will demonstrate the antithesis or
the opposite of hope--withdrawal, or the core pathology of infancy.
○ Infants will retreat from the outside world and begin the journey toward
serious psychological disturbance.

II. EARLY CHILDHOOD

● A period paralleling Freud’s anal stage and ecompassing approximately the 2nd and
3rd years of life.
● Young children receive pleasure not only from mastering the sphincter muscle but
also from mastering other body functions such as urinating, walking, throwing,
holding, and so on.
● Children develop a sense of control over their interpersonal environment, as well as
a measure of self-control.
● A time of experiencing doubt and shame, as they learn that many of their attempts
at autonomy are unsuccessful.

♥ ANAL-URETHRAL-MUSCULAR MODE
● Children’s primary psychosexual adjustment is the anal-urethral-muscular mode
wherein children learn to control their body, especially in relation to cleanliness and
mobility.
● Early childhood is more than a time of toilet training; it is also a time of learning to
walk, run, hug parents, and hold on to toys and other objects.
● Children are likely to display some stubborn tendencies. (E.g. snuggle up to their
mother or suddenly push her away)
● Early childhood is a time of contradiction; a time of stubborn rebellion and meek
compliance, a time of impulsive self-expression and compulsive deviance, a time of
loving cooperation and hateful resistance.
♥ AUTONOMY VERSUS SHAME AND DOUBT
● Children are likely to find a culture that attempts to inhibit some of their self
expression.
○ E.g. Parents may shame their children for soiling their pants or for making a
mess with their food, and also instill doubt by questioning their children’s
ability to meet their standards.
● The ratio should be in favor of autonomy. Too little autonomy will have difficulties in
subsequent stages.
● Autonomy grows out of basic trust, and if basic trust has been established in
infancy, children learn to have faith in themselves and their world remains intact
while they experience a mild psychosocial crisis.
● Shame is a feeling of self-consciousness, of being looked at and exposed.
● Doubt is the feeling of not being certain, the feeling that something remains hidden
and cannot be seen.

♥ WILL: THE BASIC STRENGTH OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

● The basic strength of will or willfulness evolves from the resolution of the crisis of
autonomy versus shame and doubt.
 ● The beginning of free will and willpower.
○ Mature willpower and a significant measure of free will are reserved for later
stages of development.
● Children will only develop when their environment allows them some self-
expression in their control of sphincters and other muscles.
● Inadequate will is expressed as compulsion, the core pathology of early childhood.
○ Too little will and too much compulsivity carry forward into the play age as
lack of purpose, and into the school age as lack of confidence.

III. PLAY AGE

● A period covering the same time as Freud’s phallic phase--roughly ages 3-5 years.
● Preschool children are developing locomotion, language skills, curiosity,
imagination, and the ability to set goals.

♥ GENITAL-LOCOMOTOR MODE
● Primary psychosexual mode is genital-locomotor.
● Erikson saw the Oedipal situation as a prototype of the lifelong power of human
playfulness and should not be taken literally.
○ It is a drama played out in the child’s imagination and includes the budding
understanding of such basic concepts as reproduction, growth, future, and
death.
○ A little girl envies boys because society grants more prerogative to children
with a penis.
● Unless sexual interest is provoked by cultural sex play or by adult sexual abuse, the
Oedipus complex produces no harmful effects on later personality development.
● The interest that play-age children have in genital activity is accompanied by their
increasing facility at locomotion.
● Their rudimentary will is now evolving into activity with a purpose.
● Children’s cognitive abilities enable them to manufacture elaborate fantasies that
include Oedipal fantasies but also include imagining what it is like to be grown up,
to be omnipotent, or to be a ferocious animal.
♥ INITIATIVE VERSUS GUILT
● Children adopt an intrusive head-on mode of approaching the world. Although they
begin to adopt initiative in their selection and pursuit of goals, many goals such as
marrying their mother or father or leaving home, must be either repressed or
delayed.
● The consequence of these taboo and inhibited goals is guilt.
● Ratio should favor initiative.
● Unbridled initiative may lead to chaos and a lack of moral principles. If guilt is
dominant, children may become compulsively moralistic or overly inhibited.
● Inhibition--antipathy of purpose--constitutes the core pathology of the play age.
♥ PURPOSE: THE BASIC STRENGTH OF THE PLAY AGE
● The conflict produces the basic strength of purpose.
● Their genital interests have a direction, they set goals and pursue them with
purpose.
● Children are developing a conscience and beginning to attach labels such as right
and wrong to their behavior.
 ● This youthful conscience became the “cornerstone of morality”.

IV. SCHOOL AGE

● Covers development from about age 6 to approximately age 12 or 13 and matches
the latency years of Freud’s theory.
● At this age, the social world of children is expanding beyond family to include peers,
teachers, and other adult models.
● Their wish to know becomes strong and is tied to their basic striving for
competence.
● Does not necessarily mean formalized schools.

♥ LATENCY
● Important because it allows children to divert their energies to learning the
technology of their culture and the strategies of their social interactions.
● They begin to form a picture of themselves as competent or incompetent.
○ These self images are the origin of ego identity.
♥ INDUSTRY VERSUS INFERIORITY
● School age is a time of tremendous social growth and little sexual development.
● Industry is the willingness to remain busy with something and to finish a job.
● If their work is insufficient to accomplish their goals, they acquire a sense of
inferiority.
○ E.g. if children acquire too much guilt and too little purpose during the play
age, they will likely feel inferior and incompentent during school age.
● Failure is not inevitable. People can successfully handle the crisis of any given
stage even though they were not completely successful in previous stages.
● Inferiority can serve as an impetus to do one’s best, but an oversupply of this can
block productive activity and stunt one’s feelings of competence.

V. ADOLESCENCE
● Period from puberty to young adulthood.
● One of the most crucial developmental stages because, by the end of this period, a
person must gain a firm sense of ego identity.
● A period of social latency--it is an adaptive phase of personality development, a
period of trial and error.
○ E.g. Western societies permit people to experiment roles and beliefs.

♥ PUBERTY
● Defined as genital maturation, and plays a relatively minor role.
● Important because it triggers expectations of adult roles yet ahead--roles that are
essentially social and can be filled only through a struggle to attain ego identity.
♥ IDENTITY VERSUS IDENTITY CONFUSION
● The search for ego identity reaches a climax as young people strive to find out who
they are and who they are not.
● Young people draw from a variety of earlier self-images that have been accepted or
rejected.
● Identity strengthens into a crisis as young people learn to cope with this
psychosocial conflict.
 ● A crisis should not suggest a threat or catastrophe but rather a turning point, a
crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential.
● An identity crisis may last for many years and can result in either greater or lesser
ego strength.
● Identity emerges from two sources:
○ Adolescents’ affirmation or repudiation of childhood identifications.
○ Their historical and social contexts, which encourage conformity to certain
standards.
● The society in which they live plays a substantial role in shaping their identity.
● Often they must either repudiate the values of parents or reject those of the peer
group, a dilemma that may intensify their identity confusion.
○ Identity confusion is a syndrome of problems that includes a divided self
image, an inability to establish intimacy, a sense of time urgency, a lack of
concentration on required tasks, and a rejection of family or community
standards.
● Young people must experience some doubt and confusion about who they are
before they can evolve a stable identity.
● Too much confusion can lead to pathological adjustment in the form of regression
to earlier stages of development.
● If we develop the proper ratio of identity to identity confusion, we will have:
○ Faith in some sort of ideological principle.
○ Ability to freely decide how we should behave.
○ Trust in our peers and adults who give us advice regarding goals and
aspirations.
○ Confidence in our choice of an eventual occupation.
♥ FIDELITY: THE BASIC STRENGTH OF ADOLESCENCE
● Fidelity--faith in one’s ideology.
● After establishing their internal standards of conduct, adolescents are no longer in
need of parental guidance but have confidence in their own religious, political, and
social ideologies.
● Young people must learn to trust others before they can have faith in their own view
of the future.
● The pathological counterpart of fidelity is role repudiation--core pathology of
adolescence that blocks one’s ability to synthesize various self-images and values
into a workable identity.
○ Can take the form of either diffidence or defiance.
■ Diffidence is an extreme lack of self-trust or self-confidence and is
expressed as shyness or hesitancy to express oneself.
■ Defiance is the act of rebelling against authority and stubbornly
holding to socially unacceptable beliefs and practices.
○ Some amount of role repudiation is necessary because it injects some new
ideas and new vitality into the social structure.

VI. YOUNG ADULTHOOD

● People must acquire the ability to fuse that identity with the identity of another
person while maintaining their sense of individuality.
● A time from about age 19-30.
 ● Marked as the acquisition of intimacy at the beginning of the stage and the
development of generativity at the end.
● A relatively short time but for others may continue for several decades.

♥ GENITALITY
● True genitality can develop only during young adulthood when it is distinguished by
mutual trust and a stable sharing of sexual satisfactions with a loved person.
● Can exist only in an intimate relationship.
♥ INTIMACY VERSUS ISOLATION
● Intimacy--ability to fuse one’s identity with that of another person without fear of
losing it.
○ Can be achieved only after people have formed a stable ego.
○ Infatuations are not true intimacy.
○ People who are unsure of their identity may either shy away from
psychosocial intimacy or desperately seek intimacy through meaningless
sexual encounters.
○ Mature intimacy means an ability and willingness to share a mutual trust
that involves sacrifice, compromise, and commitment within two equals.
○ Should be a requirement for marriage.
● Isolation--the incapacity to take chances with one’s identity by sharing true
intimacy.
● Some degree of isolation is essential before one can acquire mature love.
♥ LOVE: THE BASIC STRENGTH OF YOUNG ADULTHOOD
● Love is the mature devotion that overcomes basic differences between men and
women.
● Although love includes intimacy, it also contains some degree of isolation, because
each partner is permitted to retain a separate identity.
● Mature love means commitment, sexual passion, cooperation, competition, and
friendship.
● The antipathy of love is exclusivity is the core pathology of this age.
○ E.g. excluding certain people, activities, and ideas.

VII. ADULTHOOD
● A time when people begin to take their place in society and assume responsibility
for whatever society produces.
● Longest stage of development.
● Ages 31-60.

♥ PROCREATIVITY
● Refers to assuming responsibility for the care of offspring.
● This also includes caring for one’s children as well as other children.
● Working productively to transmit culture from one generation to the next.

♥ GENERATIVITY VERSUS STAGNATION

● Generativity--the generation of new beings as well as new products and new ideas.
 ○ Includes the procreation of children, the production of work, and the
creation of new things and ideas that contribute to the building of a better
world.
○ People have a need not only to learn, but also to instruct--extending beyond
one’s own children the altruistic concern for other young people.
○ Grows out of intimacy and identity.
○ This motivation is not merely an obligation or a selfish need but an
evolutionary drive to make a contribution to succeeding generations and to
ensure the continuity of human society as well.
● Self-absorption and stagnation--when people become too absorbed in themselves,
too self-indulgent.
○ Creative people must, at times, remain in a dormant stage and be absorbed
with themselves in order to eventually generate new growth.
♥ CARE: THE BASIC STRENGTH OF ADULTHOOD
● Care is a widening commitment to take care of the persons, the products, and the
ideas one has learned to care for.
● Arises from each basic ego strength.
● Care is not a duty or obligation but a natural desire emerging from the conflict
between generativity and stagnation.
● The antipathy of care is rejectivity and is the unwillingness to take care of certain
persons or groups.
○ Manifested as self-centeredness, provincialism, or pseudospeciation--the
belief that other groups of people are inferior to one’s own.
● Has far reaching implications for the survival of the species as well as for every
individual’s psychosocial development.

VIII. OLD AGE

● 60 to the end of life.
● Old age need not mean that people are no longer generative.
● Old people can remain productive and creative like being caring grandparents to
their own grandchildren and other young members of the society.
● Can be a time of joy, playfulness, and wonder; but it is also a time of senility,
depression, and despair.

♥ GENERALIZED SENSUALITY
● Means to take pleasure in a variety of different physical sensation--sights, sounds,
tastes, odors, embraces, and perhaps genital stimulation.
● May also include a greater appeciation for the traditional lifestyle of the opposite
sex.
○ Men become more nurturant and more acceptant of the pleasures of
nonsexual relationships.
○ Women become more interested and involved in politics, finance, and world
affairs.

♥ INTEGRITY VERSUS DESPAIR

 ● Integrity--a feeling of wholeness and coherence, an ability to hold together one’s
sense of “I-ness” despite diminishing physical and intellectual powers.
○ Ego integrity is sometimes difficult to maintain when people see that they
are losing familiar aspects of their existence.
■ Under such pressure, people often feel a pervading sense of
despair, which they may express as disgust, depression, contempt
for others, or any other attitude that reveals a non acceptance of
the finite boundaries of life.
● Despair--to be without hope.
○ Once hope is lost, despair follows and life ceases to have meaning.

♥ WISDOM: THE BASIC STRENGTH OF OLD AGE

● Wisdom--informed and detached concern with life itself in the face of death itself.
○ People with detached concern exhibit an active but dispassionate interest.
○ With mature wisdom, integrity is maintained in spite of declining physical
and mental abilities.
● Wisdom draws from and contributes to the traditional knowledge passed from
generation to generation.
● People are concerned with ultimate issues, including nonexistence.
● The antithesis of wisdom is disdain--a reaction to feeling (and seeing others) in an
increasing state of being finished, confused, helpless.
○ It is a continuation of rejectivity.
● Erikson and his wife began to describe a ninth stage--a period of very old age when
physical and mental infirmities rob people of their generative abilities and reduce
them to waiting for death.

STAGE PSYCHOSOCIAL CRISIS BASIC STRENGTH CORE PATHOLOGY MODE

Infancy Basic trust vs. Basis Hope Withdrawal Oral-Sensory

(1st year of life) mistrust

Early Childhood Autonomy vs. Shame Will Compulsion Anal-Urethral-

(2-3) and Doubt Muscular

Play Age Initiative vs. Guilt Purpose Inhibition Genital-

(3-5) Locomotor

School Age Industry vs. Competence Inertia Latency

(6-12/13) Inferiority

Adolescence Identity vs. Identity Fidelity Role Repudiation Puberty

(13-18) Confusion

Young Intimacy vs. Love Exclusivity Genitality

Adulthood (18- Isolation
30)

Adulthood (50- Generativity vs. Care Rejectivity Procreativity

60) Stagnation

Old Age (60- Integrity vs. Despair Wisdom Disdain Generalised

death) Sensuality

ERIKSON’S METHODS OF INVESTIGATION

 ● Erikson insisted that personality is a product of history, culture, and biology.

I. ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES
● 1937 - Erikson made a field trip to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South
Dakota to investigate the causes of apathy among Sioux children.
○ Apathy was an expression of an extreme dependency the Sioux had
developed as a result of their reliance on various federal government
programs.
● 1939 - Erikson made a similar field trip to Northern California to study the people of
the Yurok nation who lived mostly on salmon fishing.
○ Yurok people were trained to catch fish, and therefore possessed no strong
national feeling and had little taste for war.
II. PSYCHOHISTORY
● Psychohistory is a controversial field that combines psychoanalytic concepts with
historical methods.
○ Erikson defined it as the study of individual and collective life with the
combined methods of psychoanalysis and history.
● Freud originated psychohistory with his investigation of Leonardo da Vinci; he also
collaborated with American ambassador William Bullitt to study American president
Woodrow Wilson.
● Erikson took the methods of psychohistory and studied Martin Luther and Mahatma
Gandhi.
○ Both had an important impact on history; both have the right personal
conflict and are living during a historical period that needed to resolve
collectively what could not be resolved individually.
● Erikson believed that he should be emotionally involved in his subject as an author
of psychohistory.
● Gandhi’s Truth
○ Erikson’s book that revealed strong positive feelings for Gandhi as he
attempted to answer the question of how healthy individuals such as Gandhi
work through conflict and crisis when other people are debilitated by lesser
strife.
○ Satyagraha--Gandhi’s technique of passive resistance and used it to solve
his conflicts with authorities; a tenacious, stubborn method of gathering
the truth.

RELATED RESEARCH
● Identity achievement is the healthiest ego identity status, and that it ought to
predict successful resolution of the next developmental tasks of intimacy and
generativity.

I. EGO IDENTITY STATUS IN ADOLESCENTS ACROSS CULTURES

● Erikson is what we might call today as a cross-cultural psychologist.

● 2011 - Holger Busch and Jan Hofer

 ○ Studies whether adolescents develop ego identity in the same way across
two very dissimilar cultures: the European nation of Germany and te African
nation of Cameroon.
○ German and Cameroonian adolescents were given the Extended Objective
Measure of Ego Identity Status (EOMEIS)--which measures Erikson’s four
identity statuses:
■ Achievement (successful exploration of identity elements and
commitment)
■ Foreclosure (commitment without adequate exploration of varying
identity elements)
■ Moratorium (being in a state of exploration without having
committed yet)
■ Diffusion (neither exploration nor commitment are present)
○ Identity sets up adolescents to begin to consider their future capacity to
positively guide the next generation.
○ Cameroonians are more prosocial and interdependent than the Germans.
○ Findings reflect how each culture provides unique pathways as Erikson
predicted.
II. DOES IDENTITY PRECEDE INTIMACY
● Researchers Wim Beyers and Inge Seiffge-Krenke (2010)
○ Found evidence for a strong developmental progression from identity to
intimacy, with increasing ego development from ages 15-25--from more
conforming at age 15, to more self-aware and individualistic at age 25.
○ Erikson himself once wrote, “the condition of twoness is that one must first
become oneself.”

CRITIQUE OF ERIKSON
● Came to psychology from art and saw the world as an artist.
● THEORY RATING:
○ ABILITY TO GENERATE RESEARCH: higher than average.
○ FALSIFIABILITY: average.
○ ORGANIZED KNOWLEDGE: theory is limited to developmental stages.
○ CAN BE SERVED AS A GUIDE FOR ACTION: provide many general guidelines
but offer little specific advice.
○ INTERNALLY CONSISTENT: high.
○ POSSESSES A SET OF OPERATIONALLY DEFINED TERMS: not much.
○ PARSIMONIOUS: moderate.
● CONCEPT OF HUMANITY:
○ Middle of Determinism and Free Choice
○ Optimistic
○ Causality (high)
○ Mixed on Unconscious and Conscious determinants.
○ Social
○ Uniqueness