Erik Erikson
got trained under Anna Freud who is the daughter
of Sigmund Freud. We'll talk more about that and them later.
He then came up with a life stage
developmental pattern. So we talked about several stages already
and we'll talk about a couple more after this.
And he took the first five stages
which were the entire theory for Freud of what
Freud called psychosexual development. And we'll talk about that in the personality
chapter
in-depth. But what he did was he looked at it more from a social point of view,
more from an ego development point of view, less about the sexual forces which
would be libido
for Freud, and more on just
your experience in the world leading to certain kinds of
opportunities or outcomes. The first year for
Erikson is the oral stage
for Freud. Predictability of the world is what you're after.
Can you trust this world? Now it's not trust in the sense that you and I talk
about it with adult language and adult concepts.
It's just, is the world responsive to you as an infant because you've got needs.
You start crying, then somebody come. If you're hungry,
do they feed you? If you're in your own
waste products, do they clean you? If you're cold,
do they swaddle you, right? If you're in need, does the world come to your aid? If
it does,
it comes in the form of a parent usually. Then you learn that the world is a
trusting place.
But for kids who get a lot of abuse, or a lot of neglect
they learn that the world is not a place that you can trust.
It will promote mistrust in the world, not
again consciously, cognitively, but that's the experience that the world
doesn't respond in the way you need it to when you it need to.
And what you see is polarities here,
two poles. Course I hope you recognize from
our talks of statistics and normal curves, right,
it's very rare that you are going to get somebody on one extreme
or the other. Most of us are toward the middle and we lean one way or we lean another and
we're not so extreme but the extremes exist. The next stage we are looking at
that toddlerhood. Autonomy versus shame
and one of the hallmark accomplishments, now what is the toddler
doing? The
toddler is experimenting with being an independent self
in the world. Trying to get what it wants, "I want a cookie!"
" You can't have a cookie." Well that's... ahhhh....
You get punished if you say that, right? So you start to learn.
And You're trying to assert yourself. Territoriality is part of this.
But one of the hallmarks is also toilet training. Toilet training
is a big deal, right? Because it is
a mark of independence. People don't care if you poop and pee in your pants if
you're six months old.
"They may even go, ooh, did you make a little poopy in your pants?" That's cute
well it ain't cute when you're three. Now it's a mess that has to be cleaned up
and we want you to do it yourself. Well kids
who are too young don't have sphincter control. They don't control their waste
elimination. It comes out when it comes out. But as they grow older,
the world starts expecting them to do that, to develop the skills.
Well in the case where we all make mistakes,
all of us could still mess our pants when you get really, really sick,
right, or older, right?
You get this kid who's trying to trying to master
going to the bathroom on their own initiative at the right time
and if you encourage that, oh, you made a mistake, that's okay,
that's okay. We'll clean it up. You know you got on those big boy pull up pants.
You're doing good. We'll get you there. Then you're getting the support from the
environment that makes you feel
autonomy when you accomplish it. Look I did it!
Awesome! Look at you go! Now I don't have to clean it up cause you put it in the right place
yourself. Autonomy. But, if you have a kid who struggles with it,
"Again? You messed up again? Ahh, now I gotta clean up, well this just smells terrible. Look at you.
Why don't you learn how to do this? You are two and a half by golly." That kid gets
punishment as the experience, right, and is made to feel
ashamed for not accomplishing it.
So now you've got kind of a trend that starts to develop and
what you see is the trends extend.
Initiative versus guilt.
Now I got a kid who's developing. As they develop,
if they've got trust in the world, they start to develop autonomy,
they might take initiative. Take the initiative to do what? Who does anything at four?
They play. In our world where we now have childhood and they don't have to go out milking
cows immediately,
as soon as they are able to do it, they play, and are they encouraged in that
play?
I love dinosaurs, I love, I love, you know, dolls, whatever, if they're encouraged
then the world is saying that it's appropriate for them to take initiative.
The kid brings you another dinosaur for the 15 millionth time
and you go "that's awesome!" Even though you've seen it before.
You're encouraging the kid to take initiative, right? But if you don't have time for
the kid,
"come on now, I don't have time for this, go play over there."
I've seen that dinosaur. Then you are telling them
that they shouldn't be taking the initiative. It's not going to get rewarded they should
feel guilt for taking up the time of the parent.
Industry then versus inferiority. Now we're moving up
in to this prepuberty area where we send them to
schooling, formal schooling. Formal schooling then requires you do
a lot of work. Well, if you've already got this basis of
the world is trustworthy I have got a lot of autonomy, I get a lot of
support for taking initiative. Then when I try out my school work and I don't do
well, I'm going to get encouraged and
I'm going to figure it out, I'm going to overcome the obstacles and persist
versus the world is mistrustful, I feel like a shameful person I'm not very good at
anything, so I don't expect to do well in school,
and that's exactly what we thought because look at you, you couldn't get toilet
trained right. How are you ever going to get the times tables down?
Identity versus confusion is your adolescence phase.
Who Am I? Well nobody really knows up in adolescence but they have
a greater or lesser sense of it. A lot of people will try out different
types of identity, different kinds of music, etc., etc.,
like that music right there. Which means it's time to go y'all.
You all have a great, great weekend, be safe and I'll see you all Monday.
As I said before, the first five stages
map right onto the Freud psychosexual stages in development which we'll talk about
when we get to the
personality chapter. Changed the whole landscape of
how people saw people to have Freud come on to the scene.
Freud being off the mark perhaps on a number of his own points as
as we find data do not support some of them.
In other cases, there's no reputation cause it's not operationalizable.
We saw other people modify it. Other people who would be called psychodynamic in
their orientation,
and that would include Eric Erickson who trained under Anna Freud, the daughter
of Sigmund Freud, and he changed these. So it wasn't the psychosexual stages of
development. He said,
these are the stages that all people go through. They tend to have a social
component to them,
and they are about figuring out who you are, your ego identity,
and so he kept the first five but he changed what was the outcome variable so
that we're really looking at
early on in life that we already said and talked about the other day.
Trust versus mistrust. Does the world respond to me when I have needs?
If so, I trust, if not, I mistrust. toilet training era,
trying to establish will, trying to establish territory, who's in charge,
parents or the kid. Got autonomy versus shame.
Initiative versus guilt in that kind of young childhood phase and if we move into school,
industry versus inferiority, and we left off in adolescence when we talked about music.
People will experiment with different identities in adolescence as part of
figuring out who you are, but if you come into it with this pretty solid sense of
self, you don't have too much confusion.
You experiment, perhaps, but for a solid sense of who you are
versus somebody who doesn't really know who they are. Then we move through that
and we get into early adulthood which for for Ericsson is about
relationship building. There's different kinds of relationships. The
critical one that he would look at is the mating relationship or love
relationship.
So there's an intimate relationship there but there's other kinds of
intimacies, not just sexual intimacies. Intimacy is about about trusting people.
It's about being able to reveal your secrets, your fears, your desires to
somebody else,
and that somebody else is trustworthy and you think they'll keep that in
confidence and visa versa.
So it's about negotiating relationships which might be work relationships,
friendships,
family relationships, et cetera, and then as we move through that we're into
our
career years. Those careers might be any number of things. It might be home-making,
it might be
in an industry, it might be in a trade, but what you're doing is essentially
generating
for you and those around you, if you are in the positive pole of this
of this stage, the generativity, where you're now
getting not only for yourself but maybe for your family, maybe for your friends,
maybe you work and volunteer at church, or at a soup kitchen, or you do things that
benefit other people cause you have this
energy, you have this expression of self that allows you to
generate for others, versus the flip side of that being self-absorbed,
looking out for other people cause you know they can't be trusted. The world is a
mean place, you better get yours before they get you,
might have to do a little back-stabbing to get what you want but it leads you to a
course of action where you're not very socially involved because people
don't feel like that they can trust you or that you're a good person
and then finally, you get to the last stage cause he says you don't stop developing.
You develop all the way through the end.
All the way through the stages that lead us right up to death.
And when you're at the end phase, after you've retired and after you get to the part where
maybe your health is deteriorating,
you can look back on life and what you see is a trend that can develop.
If the world is trusting and people are supportive, you develop a sense of autonomy
which allows you to take initiative. If that's supported, you become industrious.
If that's supported, you have a sense of identity, if that's supported
you can become more intimate because you have a good foundation for
knowing who you are and who you can trust and if that's the case then you can form
relationships that allow you to be generative throughout your lifetime and when you get to the
end of it all
on the deathbed you look back with integrity. You say, well you know,
I had a pretty good life. I don't have an absence of regrets.
Surely everybody has regrets and things they wish they had done differently
but you can look back on it with a sense of pride that you did the best you could
with what you had
when you had to, and you got people around you because you've built these
relationships. So you're not alone and you can look back on it
with satisfaction versus if the world was a mean world to you and it didn't respond when
you were an infant,
didn't give you what you needed. It was either neglectful or abusive, for example,
it might lead you to a period where you're developing a sense of shame which leads
you to the sense of guilt,
making you feel inferior, leading you to some confusion about your role in the
world.
Tend to be isolated which would make you more self-absorbed
and you get to the end of it, where are the people that are surrounding you loving,? Well, they're not
there cause you didn't form those relationships
because you didn't put yourself out there because you didn't think you could
trust other people,
because the world was a place that you found was punishing
and something to be guarded against. So you could see that these are trends and
nobody is usually extremely here or extremely there.
If we threw a normal distribution on top those polls,we'd see very few people
at extreme ends of this.
Most people will be toward the middle, leaning one way or the other,
and through life events or your own self initiated change,
you might be able to change the course of action for the positive or for the
negative depending on what's happening in your life,
and what your own goals might be.
Now, for your test, like I said, you might want to know stage 8
real well for you items. Ha!
See how I do you if you come on in this... thank you for being here.
People say, what's retrospective? If you look back
upon your life retrospectively it is to examine its past,
right, and if you look back retrospectively at stage 8,
the last stages, if things went generally well for you, you'll have a sense of integrity,
a sense of satisfaction, and if they didn't go well for you, you'll have a sense of despair,
right? Bitterness is a possibility. People, you know people who get to the end of life
and they've got a lot of bitterness.
For Erikson, that's what happened. The the world shaped them in that way.