Childhood and Society
The eight stages, and the introduction of culture and history into developmental theory.
Erikson sets out a psychosocial account of development that runs the length of a life, extending Freud's psychosexual stages into a sequence of eight tensions, from basic trust against mistrust in infancy to integrity against despair in age. Each stage poses a task the ego must negotiate, and each carries forward into what follows, so an adult difficulty can be read as an earlier task left unsettled.
The argument rests on clinical case material set beside anthropological fieldwork among the Sioux and the Yurok, studies of children's play, and readings of historical lives. Culture and history are treated as constituents of the psyche, not a backdrop to it.
For the consulting room, the book offers a frame for placing a presenting difficulty within a whole life and its social setting, and for hearing identity itself as something worked out over time rather than fixed early.
About the author
Erik Homburger Erikson
Erik H. Erikson (1902 to 1994) was a German-born American psychoanalyst who shaped how clinicians think about development across the whole life span. Trained in Vienna within the psychoanalytic circle, he later worked in the United States. In Childhood and Society he set out eight psychosocial stages, each carrying a central tension, and gave clinical weight to identity and the identity crisis. He argued that culture and history shape personality, extending analytic theory beyond the early years into adulthood and old age.
Details
- 1950
- English
- W. W. Norton
- W. W. Norton, 2nd edition, 1963
- 445
- 9780393096224