Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [257]
Krebs went off to Harvard, where he earned his master’s in one year and his doctorate in two more—an almost unheard-of feat by that time and all the more remarkable since during part of his graduate years he had a half-time job as head teaching assistant of the introductory course in psychology and social relations at Harvard. He received his Ph.D. in 1970, was immediately hired by Harvard as an assistant professor and head of the undergraduate program, and stayed for four years. Then he moved to Simon Fraser University and has been a full professor there since 1982. At sixty-five, he is still tall, reasonably trim, and relatively youthful-looking; one would never take him for so hardworking a scholar with so strange a history.
Krebs’s curriculum vitae has an impressive list of publications, most of them in the field of moral development. He has said of his career, “I think it’s no accident that I became so interested in moral development.” To which one must add that he has continued his own academic development by abandoning the Kohlberg approach after many years of working with it, devising a rather different model, and, as mentioned above, elaborating his own Darwinian explanation of the matter.
Development from A to Z
The latest trend in developmental psychology was foretold nearly four centuries ago by that most perceptive of lay psychologists, William Shakespeare. Unlike Piaget and his followers, who see development as substantially complete by adolescence or early adulthood, Shakespeare offered a whole-life and less idealized picture in the famous “All the world’s a stage” soliloquy in As You Like It, in which Jaques sets out the “seven ages” of man, starting with “the infant, / Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” and ending with “second childishness, and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
As early as the 1920s, some psychologists began to think of development as continuing throughout life; it was then that several major longitudinal studies, described earlier, were begun. But their goal was primarily to measure changes over the years rather than to elucidate the processes that produced those changes. In 1950, however, the psychoanalyst and developmentalist Erik Erikson offered the first detailed process model of development throughout life, based on his analysis of the major psychosocial challenges confronting the individual at each of eight stages of life and the changes those challenges bring about.
Erikson (1902–1994), though he never earned a higher degree, was one of the most highly respected developmentalists in this country for over half a century and held professorships at several illustrious universities.104 He was born of Danish parents; his Protestant father left his Jewish mother before Erik was born, and she later married a German-Jewish pediatrician. Erik grew up doubly an outsider, scorned as a Jew in school but mocked as a goy in the synagogue because of his blond hair and blue eyes. The experience gave him a special interest in the struggle to achieve identity in the course of development.
In his youth he studied art and for a few years worked as an artist, but during a visit to Rome, poring over the works of Michelangelo and thinking of his own, he suffered such feelings of inferiority and anxiety that he went to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud. The result was not only relief from the anxiety but a new goal: he studied psychoanalysis and became a lay analyst.
In 1933, when the Nazis achieved power in Germany, Erikson and his wife immigrated first to Denmark and then to America. He practiced psychoanalysis, taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago (eventually returning to Harvard), took part in longitudinal research at Berkeley, and spent some time with anthropologists investigating two Native American