Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [258]
The central issue in Stage 1, infancy, is the conflict between the basic attitudes of trust and mistrust. Through the relationship with loving parents the infant resolves the crisis, learning to appreciate interdependence and relatedness, and acquiring trust. In Stage 2, early childhood, the struggle is between the child’s need for a sense of autonomy versus a sense of doubt and shame. If allowed experiences of free choice and self-control under proper guidance, the child resolves the crisis by learning the importance of rules and acquiring self-control or will. So it goes, each stage presenting a new crisis, adding to the personality, building ever further, and, if passage through each stage is successful, achieving ever greater integration of the self with society.
Here is Erikson’s life-span view in tabular form. Each stage is a higher level of development than the preceding one:105
Stage: conflict Successful resolution
1. Infancy: basic trust vs. basic mistrust Trust
2. Early childhood: autonomy vs. shame Will power and independence
3. Play age: initiative vs. guilt Purpose
4. School age (six to ten or so): industry vs. inferiority Competency
5. Adolescence: identity vs. role confusion Sense of self
6. Early adulthood: intimacy vs. isolation Love
7. Middle adulthood: generativity vs. stagnation Caring for others; productiveness
8. Old age: ego integrity vs. despair Wisdom; a sense of integrity strong enough to withstand physical disintegration
Failure to pass through any stage successfully blocks normal healthful development. A neglected or unloved infant, for instance, may never learn to trust anyone, a lack that will interfere with or distort all the later stages of development. A young adolescent whose parents keep him or her too tightly bound to them may fail to pass successfully through Stage 5 and achieve an independent identity; the outcomes are such failures as “Momma’s boy,” at one extreme, and the rebellious delinquent at the other.
Erikson’s theory played a major part in the shift in developmental psychology to the life-span perspective. Another influence in that shift was the mass of life-span data produced by the several major longitudinal studies that had been under way for decades. A third was the passage of the post–World War II “baby boom” generation from childhood to young and middle adulthood, and the concomitant increase in the over-sixty-five segment of the population, both of which forced social scientists and legislators to pay attention to the changes and problems characteristic of middle and old age.
The shift to the life-span view began slowly in the 1950s, picked up in the 1960s, and became a definite trend in the 1970s. In that decade, the psychiatrist Roger L. Gould of the UCLA School of Medicine outlined a theory of adult life-stage development in several articles, the psychoanalyst George E. Vaillant of Dartmouth did likewise in Adaptation to Life, the psychologist Daniel J. Levinson of Yale did so in The Seasons of a Man’s Life; and the writer Gail Sheehy brought the message to a large popular audience with her best-selling Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. By 1980, although most research in developmental psychology still dealt with the early years of life, the view that development continues in stages throughout life had become the dominant paradigm of developmental psychology and the common opinion of the literate laity.106
Unlike Erikson’s view, current life-span developmentalism is pluralistic and deals with all aspects of development, not just the psychosocial. It explains the stage-by-stage changes in personality, social relations, and cognition in terms of biological influences, age-related psychological changes, and the social and environmental influences that are