Erik Erikson can drive a person mad with his florid language
and abstractions, and his antediluvian sexual stages are nearly nails in his
coffin (lo-rest-his-so), but the man and his wife were a force of nature. He
never finished his bachelor’s degree, but he knew what it meant to be human.
Who does that? The sense kept washing over me that he was jumping ahead of
empirical data and taking hold of a reality-in-itself that transcended his case
studies. I can’t help thinking that, even when he was wrong, he was right. I
personally think he’s bigger than psychology, perhaps fitting more the
philosopher-sociologist type with his wide-sweeping anthropologic and
reality-unifying theories.
His 8 stages are brilliant, but I think they are basically
restatements of the pulse of human ‘becomings.’ The stages represent an opportunity
for each person to ‘become more’ or ‘become less’ in the world.
• Trust
(becoming more) vs. Mistrust (becoming less)
• Autonomy
(more) vs. Shame (less)
• Initiative
(more) vs. Guilt (less)
You get the picture. Apparently Joan did too when she wrote,
“I am persuaded that only by doing and making do we become.” Each stage either
sees a person desiring to become larger with more involvement in the universe
by confirming and building on the freedom and success from an earlier stage, or
the person desires to withdraw and cover their wounds, to avoid becoming an
inflated target and insulate themselves against the hostile environment that is
slowly (or quickly) eroding their ego and sense of capability. As an aside, I
was explaining this to my 8-year old daughter, and when I asked her what she
thought would happen if an infant doesn’t trust its world and begins to
withdraw, she answered, “They won’t learn!” This is true, and perfectly
describes the stunted growth of a psyche that fears the world and its presence
in it. Sartre and the existentialists would have had a few things to say about
this, as their definitions of an inauthentic and dysfunctional human being
relate closely to those who are attempting to escape from their essential
freedom and suffering in the world (without success).
And I have to give a shout out to Joan Erikson (sup Joanie
babe!!) for being willing to go back and modify the 8th stage based upon her
first-hand account of it which neither she nor Erik could have augured from
their 40-year-old-or-so perspectives when they wrote Life Cycle Completed. Like
a boss—at 93 years old—she scrawled out a new definition to ‘wisdom’ and
‘integrity’, representing them not merely as virtues—wispy, spiritual
attributes of the distanced-from-life—but as qualities of someone who is
‘in-touch’ with life and it’s meanings in a very intimate and mystical way. She
kicked ass for old people the world over, and made her voice heard above the
melee of the young, proud, and heedless. Joanie babe, if you weren’t dead and
rotted, I’d kiss your un-rotted face for your bravery and un-rottedness!
Quotes From the Book:
Epigenesis—step by step growth and gradual differentiation
of parts. In embryology as well as psychology, each organ or trait has its time
of origin—a factor as important as the locus of the origin. If the eye, said
Stockard, does not arise at the appointed time, “it will never be able to
express itself fully, since the moment for the rapid outgrowth of some other
part will have arrived.” If the organ misses its time of ascendance, it is not
only doomed as an entity, it endangers at the same time the whole hierarchy of
organs. The result of normal development, however, is proper relationship of
size and function among all body organs. (summary with quote)
A sense of defeat [in early childhood]…can lead to deep
shame and a compulsive doubt whether one will ever be able to feel that one
willed what one did—or did what one willed. (37)
[Ritualization is a way of saying] ‘this is how we do
things’…[and has] adaptive value...in the social process...that must do for
human adaptation what the instinctive fit into a section of nature will do for
an animal species. (42)
[Parents are the first to] help evoke and to strengthen in
the infant the sense of a primal other—the I’s counterpart. (44)
The mutual recognition between mother and infant may e a
model of some of the most exalted encounters throughout life. (45)
I submit that this first and dimmest affirmation of the
described polarity of the ‘I’ and ‘Other’ is basic to a human being’s ritual
and esthetic needs for a pervasive quality which we call the numinous: the aura
of a hallowed presence. The numinous assures us, ever again, of separateness
transcended and yet also of distinctiveness confirmed, and thus of the very
basis of a sense of ‘I’. (45)
Play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with
experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experiment and
planning. (51)
[Adults, too, play] with past experience and anticipated
tasks, beginning with that activity in the autosphere called thinking. (51)
Hope connotes the most basic quality of “I”-ness, without
which life could not begin or meaningfully end. (62)
In old age a retrospective mythologizing…can amount to a
pseudointegration as a defense against lurking despair. (65)
An immense power of verification [in mature adulthood]
pervades this meeting of bodies [sex] and temperaments after the hazardously
long human preadulthood. (70)
It seems that the stage of generativity, as long as a threatening
sense of stagnation is kept at bay, is pervasively characterized by a supremely
sanctioned disregard of death…Youth and old age, then, are the times that dream
of rebirth, while adulthood is too busy taking care of actual births and is
rewarded for it with a unique sense of boisterous and timeless historical
reality—a sense which can seem somewhat unreal to the young and to the old, for
it denies the shadow of nonbeing. (80)
The problem is such that so basic a sense of centrality [of
the ego] depends for its renewal from stage to stage on an increasing number of
others: some of them close enough to be individually acknowledged as an ‘other’
in some important segment of life, but for the most part a vague number of
interrelated others who seek to confirm their sense of reality by sharing… (89)
I am persuaded that only by doing and making do we become.
(Joan Erikson, 127)
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