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CHAPTER 8

Sullivan:

Interpersonal Theory

4. Overview of Interpersonal Theory 4. Biography of Harry Stack Sullivan

· Tensions

Needs

Anxiety

Energy Transformations

Dynamisms

Malevolence Intimacy

Lust

Self-System

· Personifications

Bad-Mother, Good-Mother Me Personifications

Eidetic Personifications

· Levels of Cognition Prototaxic Level

Parataxic Level

Syntaxic Level

4. Stages of Development

Infancy

Childhood

Juvenile Era

Preadolescence Early Adolescence Late Adolescence Adulthood

Sullivan

· Psychological Disorders

· Psychotherapy

Related Research

The Pros and Cons of "Chums" for Girls and Boys Imaginary Friends

Critique of Sullivan

4. Concept of Humanity Key Terms and Concepts

he young boy had no friends his age but did have several imaginary playmates. 1 At school, his Irish brogue and quick mind made him unpopular among school​mates. Then, at age 81/2, the boy experienced an intimate relationship with a 13-year-old boy that transformed his life. The two boys remained unpopular with other children, but they developed close bonds with each other. Most scholars (Alexander, 1990, 1995; Chapman, 1976; Havens, 1987) believe that the relationship between these boys—Harry Stack Sullivan and Clarence Bellinger—was at least in some ways homosexual, but others (Perry, 1982) believed that the two boys were never sexually intimate.

Why is it important to know about Sullivan's sexual orientation? This knowl​edge is important for at least two reasons. First, a personality theorist's early life his​tory, including gender, birth order, religious beliefs, ethnic background, schooling, as well as sexual orientation, all relate to that person's adult beliefs, conception of humanity, and the type of personality theory that that person will develop.

Second, in Sullivan's case, his sexual orientation may have prevented him from gaining the acceptance and recognition he might have had if others had not suspected that he was homosexual. A. H. Chapman (1976) has argued that Sullivan's influence is pervasive yet unrecognized largely because many psychologists and psychiatrists of his day had difficulty accepting the theoretical concepts and therapeutic practices of someone they suspected of being homosexual. Chapman contended that Sullivan's contemporaries might have easily accepted a homosexual artist, musician, or writer, but, when it came to a psychiatrist, they were still guided by the concept "Physician heal thyself." This phrase was so ingrained in American society during Sullivan's time that mental health workers found it very difficult to "admit their indebtedness to a psychiatrist whose homosexuality was commonly known" (Chapman, 1976, p. 12). Thus, Sullivan, who otherwise might have achieved greater fame, was shackled by sexual prejudices that kept him from being regarded as American's foremost psy​chiatrist of the first half of the 20th century.

Overview of Interpersonal Theory

Harry Stack Sullivan, the first American to construct a comprehensive personality theory, believed that people develop their personality within a social context. With​out other people, Sullivan contended, humans would have no personality. "A per​sonality can never be isolated from the complex of interpersonal relations in which the person lives and has his being" (Sullivan, 1953a, p. 10). Sullivan insisted that knowledge of human personality can be gained only through the scientific study of interpersonal relations. His interpersonal theory emphasizes the importance of var​ious developmental stages—infancy, childhood, the juvenile era, preadolescence, early adolescence, late adolescence, and adulthood. Healthy human development rests on a person's ability to establish intimacy with another person, but unfortu​nately, anxiety can interfere with satisfying interpersonal relations at any age. Per​haps the most crucial stage of development is preadolescence—a period when chil​dren first possess the capacity for intimacy but have not yet reached an age at which their intimate relationships are complicated by lustful interests. Sullivan believed that people achieve healthy development when they are able to experience both inti​macy and lust toward the same other person.

Ironically, Sullivan's own relationships with other people were seldom satisfy​ing. As a child, he was lonely and physically isolated; as an adolescent, he suffered at least one schizophrenic episode; and as an adult, he experienced only superficial and ambivalent interpersonal relationships. Despite, or perhaps because of these in​terpersonal difficulties, Sullivan contributed much to an understanding of human personality. In Leston Havens's (1987) language, "He made his contributions walk​ing on one leg . . . he never gained the spontaneity, receptiveness, and capacity for intimacy his own interpersonal school worked to achieve for others" (p. 184).

Biography of Harry Stack Sullivan

Harry Stack Sullivan was born in the small farming town of Norwich, New York, on February 21, 1892, the sole surviving child of poor Irish Catholic parents. His mother, Ella Stack Sullivan, was 32 when she married Timothy Sullivan and 39 when Harry was born. She had given birth to two other sons, neither of whom lived past the first year. As a consequence, she pampered and protected her only child, whose survival she knew was her last chance for motherhood. Harry's father, Timothy Sul​livan, was a shy, withdrawn, and taciturn man who never developed a close relation​ship with his son until after his wife had died and Sullivan had become a prominent physician. Timothy Sullivan had been a farm laborer and a factory worker who moved to his wife's family farm outside the village of Smyrna, some 10 miles from Norwich, before Harry's third birthday. At about this same time, Ella Stack Sullivan was mysteriously absent from the home, and Sullivan was cared for by his maternal grandmother, whose Gaelic accent was not easily understood by the young boy. After more than a year's separation, Harry's mother—who likely had been in a mental hos​pital—returned home. In effect, Sullivan then had two women to mother him. Even after his grandmother died, he continued to have two mothers because a maiden aunt then came to share in the child-rearing duties.

Although both parents were of poor Irish Catholic descent, his mother re​garded the Stack family as socially superior to the Sullivans. Sullivan accepted the social supremacy of the Stacks over the Sullivans until he was a prominent psychia​trist developing an interpersonal theory that emphasized similarities among people rather than differences. He then realized the folly of his mother's claims.

As a preschool child, Sullivan had neither friends nor acquaintances of his age. After beginning school he still felt like an outsider, being an Irish Catholic boy in a Protestant community. His Irish accent and quick mind made him unpopular with his classmates throughout his years of schooling in Smyrna.

When Sullivan was 81/2 years old, he formed a close friendship with a 13-year​old boy from a neighboring farm. This chum was Clarence Bellinger, who lived a mile beyond Harry in another school district, but who was now beginning high school in Smyrna. Although the two boys were not peers chronologically, they had much in common socially and intellectually. Both were retarded socially but ad​vanced intellectually; both later became psychiatrists and neither ever married. The relationship between Harry and Clarence had a transforming effect on Sullivan's life. It awakened in him the power of intimacy, that is, the ability to love another who was more or less like himself. In Sullivan's mature theory of personality, he placed heavy emphasis on the therapeutic, almost magical power of an intimate relationship dur‑

ing the preadolescent years. This belief, along with many other Sullivanian hypothe​ses, seems to have grown out of his own childhood experiences.

Sullivan was interested in books and science, not in farming. Although he was an only child growing up on a farm that required much hard work, Harry was able to escape many of the chores by absentmindedly "forgetting" to do them. This ruse was successful because his indulgent mother completed them for him and allowed Sullivan to receive credit.

A bright student, Sullivan graduated from high school as valedictorian at age 16. He then entered Cornell University intending to become a physicist, although he also had an interest in psychiatry. His academic performance at Cornell was a disas​ter, however, and he was suspended after 1 year. The suspension may not have been solely for academic deficiencies. He got into trouble with the law at Cornell, possi​bly for mail fraud. He was probably a dupe of older, more mature students who used him to pick up some chemicals illegally ordered through the mail. In any event, for the next 2 years Sullivan mysteriously disappeared from the scene. Perry (1982) re​ported he may have suffered a schizophrenic breakdown at this time and was con​fined to a mental hospital. Alexander (1990), however, surmised that Sullivan spent this time under the guidance of an older male model who helped him overcome his sexual panic and who intensified his interest in psychiatry. Whatever the answer to Sullivan's mysterious disappearance from 1909 to 1911, his experiences seemed to have matured him academically and possibly sexually.

In 1911, with only one very unsuccessful year of undergraduate work, Sulli​van enrolled in the Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery, where his grades, though only mediocre, were a great improvement over those he earned at Cornell. He finished his medical studies in 1915 but did not receive his degree until 1917. Sulli​van claimed that the delay was because he had not yet paid his tuition in full, but Perry (1982) found evidence that he had not completed all his academic require​ments by 1915 and needed, among other requirements, an internship. How was Sul​livan able to obtain a medical degree if he lacked all the requirements? None of Sul​livan's biographers has a satisfactory answer to this question. Alexander (1990) hypothesized that Sullivan, who had accumulated nearly a year of medically related employment, used his considerable persuasive abilities to convince authorities at Chicago College of Medicine and Surgery to accept that experience in lieu of an in​ternship. Any other deficiency may have been waived if Sullivan agreed to enlist in the military. (The United States had recently entered World War I and was in need of medical officers.)

After the war Sullivan continued to serve as a military officer, first for the Fed​eral Board for Vocational Education and then for the Public Health Service. How​ever, this period in his life was still confusing and unstable, and he showed little promise of the brilliant career that lay just ahead (Perry, 1982).

In 1921, with no formal training in psychiatry, he went to St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, DC, where he became closely acquainted with William Alanson White, one of America's best-known neuropsychiatrists. At St. Elizabeth, Sullivan had his first opportunity to work with large numbers of schizophrenic pa​tients. While in Washington, he began an association with the Medical School of the University of Maryland and with the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland. During this Baltimore period of his life, he conducted intensive studies of

schizophrenia, which led to his first hunches about the importance of interpersonal relationships. In trying to make sense out of the speech of schizophrenic patients, Sullivan concluded that their illness was a means of coping with the anxiety gener​ated from social and interpersonal environments. His experiences as a practicing cli​nician gradually transformed themselves into the beginnings of an interpersonal the​ory of psychiatry.

Sullivan spent much of his time and energy at Sheppard selecting and training hospital attendants. Although he did little therapy himself, he developed a system in which nonprofessional but sympathetic male attendants treated schizophrenic pa​tients with human respect and care. This innovative program gained him a reputation as a clinical wizard. However, he became disenchanted with the political climate at Sheppard when he was passed over for a position as head of the new reception cen​ter that he had advocated. In March of 1930, he resigned from Sheppard.

Later that year, he moved to New York City and opened a private practice, hop​ing to enlarge his understanding of interpersonal relations by investigating non-schizophrenic disorders, especially those of an obsessive nature (Perry, 1982). Times were hard, however, and his expected wealthy clientele did not come in the numbers he needed to maintain his expenses.

On a more positive note, his residence in New York brought him into contact with several psychiatrists and social scientists with a European background. Among these were Karen Homey, Erich Fromm, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann who, along with Sullivan, Clara Thompson, and others, formed the Zodiac group, an informal organization that met regularly over drinks to discuss old and new ideas in psychia​try and the related social sciences. Sullivan, who had met Thompson earlier, per​suaded her to travel to Europe to take a training analysis under Sandor Ferenczi, a disciple of Freud. Sullivan learned from all members of the Zodiac group, and through Thompson, and Ferenczi, his therapeutic technique was indirectly influenced by Freud. Sullivan also credited two other outstanding practitioners, Adolf Meyer and William Alanson White, as having had an impact on his practice of therapy. De​spite some Freudian influence on his therapeutic technique, Sullivan's theory of in​terpersonal psychiatry is neither psychoanalytic nor neo-Freudian.

During his residence in New York, Sullivan also came under the influence of several noted social scientists from the University of Chicago, which was the center of American sociological study during the 1920s and 1930s. Included among them were social psychologist George Herbert Mead, sociologists Robert Ezra Park and W I. Thomas, anthropologist Edward Sapir, and political scientist Harold Lasswell. Sullivan, Sapir, and Lasswell were primarily responsible for establishing the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation in Washington, DC, for the purpose of join​ing psychiatry to the other social sciences. Sullivan served as the first president of the foundation and also as editor of the foundation's journal, Psychiatry. Under Sul​livan's guidance, the foundation began a training institution known as the Washing​ton School of Psychiatry. Because of these activities, Sullivan gave up his New York practice, which was not very lucrative anyway, and moved back to Washington, DC, where he remained closely associated with the school and the journal.

In January 1949, Sullivan attended a meeting of the World Federation for Men​tal Health in Amsterdam. While on his way home, January 14, 1949, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in a Paris hotel room, a few weeks short of his 57th birthday. Not uncharacteristically, he was alone at the time.

On the personal side, Sullivan was not comfortable with his sexuality and had ambivalent feelings toward marriage (Perry, 1982). As an adult, he brought into his home a 15-year-old boy who was probably a former patient (Alexander, 1990). This young man—James Inscoe—remained with Sullivan for 22 years, looking after his financial affairs, typing manuscripts, and generally running the household. Although Sullivan never officially adopted Jimmie, he regarded him as a son and even had his legal name changed to James I. Sullivan.

Beyond Biography Was Sullivan a homosexual? For information on Sullivan's sexual orientation, see our website at

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Sullivan also had ambivalent attitudes toward his religion. Born to Catholic parents who attended church only irregularly, he abandoned Catholicism early on. In later life, his friends and acquaintances regarded him as nonreligious or even anti-Catholic, but to their surprise, Sullivan had written into his will a request to receive a Catholic burial. Incidentally, this request was granted despite the fact that Sulli​van's body had been cremated in Paris. His ashes were returned to the United States, where they were placed inside a coffin and received a full Catholic burial, complete with a requiem mass.

Sullivan's chief contribution to personality theory is his conception of devel​opmental stages. Before turning to Sullivan's ideas on the stages of development, we will explain some of his unique terminology.

Tensions

Like Freud and Jung, Sullivan (1953b) saw personality as an energy system. Energy can exist either as tension (potentiality for action) or as actions themselves (energy transformations). Energy transformations transform tensions into either covert or overt behaviors and are aimed at satisfying needs and reducing anxiety. Tension is a potentiality for action that may or may not be experienced in awareness. Thus, not all tensions are consciously felt. Many tensions, such as anxiety, premonitions, drowsiness, hunger, and sexual excitement, are felt but not always on a conscious level. In fact, probably all felt tensions are at least partial distortions of reality. Sullivan recognized two types of tensions: needs and anxiety. Needs usually re​sult in productive actions, whereas anxiety leads to nonproductive or disintegrative behaviors.

Needs

Needs are tensions brought on by biological imbalance between a person and the physiochemical environment, both inside and outside the organism. Needs are episodic once they are satisfied, they temporarily lose their power, but after a time, they are likely to recur. Although needs originally have a biological component, many of them stem from the interpersonal situation. The most basic interpersonal need is tenderness. An infant develops a need to receive tenderness from its primary caretaker (called by Sullivan "the mothering one"). Unlike some needs, tenderness requires actions from at least two people. For example, an infant's need to receive

tenderness may be expressed as a cry, smile, or coo, whereas the mother's need to give tenderness may be transformed into touching, fondling, or holding. In this ex​ample, the need for tenderness is satisfied through the use of the infant's mouth and the mother's hands.

Tenderness is a general need because it is concerned with the overall well​being of a person. General needs, which also include oxygen, food, and water, are opposed to zonal needs, which arise from a particular area of the body. Several areas of the body are instrumental in satisfying both general and zonal needs. For exam​ple, the mouth satisfies general needs by taking in food and oxygen, but it also sat​isfies the zonal need for oral activity. Also, the hands may be used to help satisfy the general need of tenderness, but they can likewise be used to satisfy the zonal need for manual activity. Similarly, other body zones, such as the anus and the genitals, can be used to satisfy both kinds of needs.

Very early in life, the various zones of the body begin to play a significant and lasting role in interpersonal relations. While satisfying general needs for food, water, and so forth, an infant expends more energy than necessary, and the excess energy is transformed into consistent characteristic modes of behavior, which Sullivan called dynamisms.

Anxiety

A second type of tension, anxiety, differs from tensions of needs in that it is dis​junctive, is more diffuse and vague, and calls forth no consistent actions for its re​lief. If infants lack food (a need), their course of action is clear; but if they are anx​ious, they can do little to escape from that anxiety.

How does anxiety originate? Sullivan (1953b) postulated that it is transferred from the parent to the infant through the process of empathy. Anxiety in the moth​ering one inevitably induces anxiety in the infant. Because all mothers have some amount of anxiety while caring for their babies, all infants will become anxious to some degree.

Just as the infant does not have the capacity to reduce anxiety, the parent has no effective means of dealing with the baby's anxiety. Any signs of anxiety or inse​curity by the infant are likely to lead to attempts by the parent to satisfy the infant's needs. For example, a mother may feed her anxious, crying baby because she mis​takes anxiety for hunger. If the baby hesitates in accepting the milk, the mother may become more anxious herself, which generates additional anxiety within the infant. Finally, the baby's anxiety reaches a level at which it interferes with sucking and swallowing. Anxiety, then, operates in opposition to tensions of needs and prevents them from being satisfied.

Anxiety has a deleterious effect on adults too. It is the chief disruptive force blocking the development of healthy interpersonal relations. Sullivan (1953b) likened severe anxiety to a blow on the head. It makes people incapable of learning, impairs memory, narrows perception, and may result in complete amnesia. It is unique among the tensions in that it maintains the status quo even to people's over​all detriment. Whereas other tensions result in actions directed specifically toward their relief, anxiety produces behaviors that (1) prevent people from learning from their mistakes, (2) keep people pursuing a childish wish for security, and (3) gener​ally ensure that people will not learn from their experiences.

Sullivan insisted that anxiety and loneliness are unique among all experiences in that they are totally unwanted and undesirable. Because anxiety is painful, people have a natural tendency to avoid it, inherently preferring the state of euphoria, or complete lack of tension. Sullivan (1954) summarized this concept by stating simply that "the presence of anxiety is much worse than its absence" (p. 100).

Sullivan distinguished anxiety from fear in several important ways. First, anx​iety usually stems from complex interpersonal situations and is only vaguely repre​sented in awareness; fear is more clearly discerned and its origins more easily pin​pointed. Second, anxiety has no positive value. Only when transformed into another tension (anger or fear, for example) can it lead to profitable actions. Third, anxiety blocks the satisfaction of needs, whereas fear sometimes helps people satisfy certain needs. This opposition to the satisfaction of needs is expressed in words that can be considered Sullivan's definition of anxiety: "Anxiety is a tension in opposition to the tensions of needs and to action appropriate to their relief" (Sullivan, I953b, p. 44).

Energy Transformations

Tensions that are transformed into actions, either overt or covert, are called energy transformations. This somewhat awkward term simply refers to our behaviors that are aimed at satisfying needs and reducing anxiety—the two great tensions. Not all energy transformations are obvious, overt actions; many take the form of emotions, thoughts, or covert behaviors that can be hidden from other people.

Dynamisms

Energy transformations become organized as typical behavior patterns that charac​terize a person throughout a lifetime. Sullivan (19531)) called these behavior patterns dynamisms, a term that means about the same as traits or habit patterns. Dynamisms are of two major classes: first, those related to specific zones of the body, including the mouth, anus, and genitals; and second, those related to tensions. This second class is composed of three categories the disjunctive, the isolating, and the con​junctive. Disjunctive dynamisms include those destructive patterns of behavior that are related to the concept of malevolence; isolating dynamisms include those be​havior patterns (such as lust) that are unrelated to interpersonal relations; and con​junctive dynamisms include beneficial behavior patterns, such as intimacy and the self-system.

Malevolence

Malevolence is the disjunctive dynamism of evil and hatred, characterized by the feeling of living among one's enemies (Sullivan, 1953b). It originates around age 2 or 3 years when children's actions that earlier had brought about maternal ten​derness are rebuffed, ignored, or met with anxiety and pain. When parents attempt to control their children's behavior by physical pain or reproving remarks, some chil​dren will learn to withhold any expression of the need for tenderness and to protect themselves by adopting the malevolent attitude. Parents and peers then find it more and more difficult to react with tenderness, which in turn solidifies the child's nega​tive attitude toward the world. Malevolent actions often take the form of timidity,

Significant intimate relationships prior to puberty are usually boy-boy or girl-girl friendships, according to Sullivan.

mischievousness, cruelty, or other kinds of asocial or antisocial behavior. Sullivan expressed the malevolent attitude with this colorful statement: "Once upon a time everything was lovely, but that was before I had to deal with people" (p. 216).

Intimacy

Intimacy grows out of the earlier need for tenderness but is more specific and in​volves a close interpersonal relationship between two people who are more or less of equal status. Intimacy must not be confused with sexual interest. In fact, it devel​ops prior to puberty, ideally during preadolescence when it usually exists between two children, each of whom sees the other as a person of equal value. Because inti​macy is a dynamism that requires an equal partnership, it does not usually exist in parent-child relationships unless both are adults and see one another as equals.

Intimacy is an integrating dynamism that tends to draw out loving reactions from the other person, thereby decreasing anxiety and loneliness, two extremely painful experiences. Because intimacy helps us avoid anxiety and loneliness, it is a rewarding experience that most healthy people desire (Sullivan, 1953b).

Lust

On the other hand, lust is an isolating tendency, requiring no other person for its sat‑ isfaction. It manifests itself as autoerotic behavior even when another person is the object of one's lust. Lust is an especially powerful dynamism during adolescence, at

which time it often leads to a reduction of self-esteem. Attempts at lustful activity are often rebuffed by others, which increases anxiety and decreases feelings of self-worth. In addition, lust often hinders an intimate relationship, especially during early adolescence when it is easily confused with sexual attraction.

Self-System

The most complex and inclusive of all the dynamisms is the self-system, a consis​tent pattern of behaviors that maintains people's interpersonal security by protecting them from anxiety. Like intimacy, the self-system is a conjunctive dynamism that arises out of the interpersonal situation. However, it develops earlier than intimacy, at about age 12 to 18 months. As children develop intelligence and foresight, they become able to learn which behaviors are related to an increase or decrease in anxi​ety. This ability to detect slight increases or decreases in anxiety provides the self-system with a built-in warning device.

The warning, however, is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it serves as a signal, alerting people to increasing anxiety and giving them an opportunity to protect themselves. On the other, this desire for protection against anxiety makes the self-system resistant to change and prevents people from profiting from anxiety-filled ex​periences. Because the primary task of the self-system is to protect people against anxiety, it is "the principal stumbling block to favorable changes in personality" (Sullivan, 1953b, p. 169). Sullivan (1964), however, believed that personality is not static and is especially open to change at the beginning of the various stages of de​velopment.

As the self-system develops, people begin to form a consistent image of them​selves. Thereafter, any interpersonal experiences that they perceive as contrary to their self-regard threatens their security. As a consequence, people attempt to defend themselves against interpersonal tensions by means of security operations, the pur​pose of which is to reduce feelings of insecurity or anxiety that result from endan​gered self-esteem. People tend to deny or distort interpersonal experiences that con​flict with their self-regard. For example, when people who think highly of themselves are called incompetent, they may choose to believe that the name-caller is stupid or, perhaps, merely joking. Sullivan (1953b) called security operations "a powerful brake on personal and human progress" (p. 374).

Two important security operations are dissociation and selective inattention. Dissociation includes those impulses, desires, and needs that a person refuses to allow into awareness. Some infantile experiences become dissociated when a baby's behavior is neither rewarded nor punished, so those experiences simply do not be​come part of the self-system. Adult experiences that are too foreign to one's stan​dards of conduct can also become dissociated. These experiences do not cease to exist but continue to influence personality on an unconscious level. Dissociated im​ages manifest themselves in dreams, daydreams, and other unintentional activities outside of awareness and are directed toward maintaining interpersonal security (Sullivan, 1953b).

The control of focal awareness, called selective inattention, is a refusal to see those things that we do not wish to see. It differs from dissociation in both degree and origin. Selectively inattended experiences are more accessible to awareness and

more limited in scope. They originate after we establish a self-system and are trig​gered by our attempts to block out experiences that are not consistent with our ex​isting self-system. For example, people who regard themselves as scrupulously law-abiding drivers may "forget" about the many occasions when they exceeded the speed limit or the times when they failed to stop completely at a stop sign. Like dis​sociated experiences, selectively inattended perceptions remain active even though they are not fully conscious. They are crucial in determining which elements of an experience will be attended and which will be ignored or denied (Sullivan, 1953b).

Personifications

Beginning in infancy and continuing throughout the various developmental stages, people acquire certain images of themselves and others. These images, called per​sonifications, may be relatively accurate, or because they are colored by people's needs and anxieties, they may be grossly distorted. Sullivan (1953b) described three basic personifications that develop during infancy—the bad-mother, the good-mother, and the me. In addition, some children acquire an eidetic personification (imaginary playmate) during childhood.

Bad-Mother, Good-Mother

Sullivan's notion of the bad-mother and good-mother is similar to Klein's concept of the bad breast and good breast. The bad-mother personification, in fact, grows out of the infant's experiences with the bad-nipple: that is, the nipple that does not sat​isfy hunger needs. Whether the nipple belongs to the mother or to a bottle held by the mother, the father, a nurse, or anyone else is not important. The bad-mother per​sonification is almost completely undifferentiated, inasmuch as it includes everyone involved in the nursing situation. It is not an accurate image of the "real" mother but merely the infant's vague representation of not being properly fed.

After the bad-mother personification is formed, an infant will acquire a good-mother personification based on the tender and cooperative behaviors of the moth​ering one. These two personifications, one based on the infant's perception of an anx​ious, malevolent mother and the other based on a calm, tender mother, combine to form a complex personification composed of contrasting qualities projected onto the same person. Until the infant develops language, however, these two opposing im​ages of mother can easily coexist (Sullivan, 1953b).

Me Personifications

During midinfancy a child acquires three me personifications (bad-me, good-me, and not-me) that form the building blocks of the self personification. Each is related to the evolving conception of me or my body. The bad-me personification is fash​ioned from experiences of punishment and disapproval that infants receive from their mothering one. The resulting anxiety is strong enough to teach infants that they are bad, but it is not so severe as to cause the experience to be dissociated or selectively inattended. Like all personifications, the bad-me is shaped out of the interpersonal

situation; that is, infants can learn that they are bad only from someone else, ordi​narily the bad-mother.

The good-me personification results from infants' experiences with reward and approval. Infants feel good about themselves when they perceive their mother's ex​pressions of tenderness. Such experiences diminish anxiety and foster the good-me personification. Sudden severe anxiety, however, may cause an infant to form the not-me personification and to either dissociate or selectively inattend experiences re​lated to that anxiety. An infant denies these experiences to the me image so that they become part of the not-me personification. These shadowy not-me personifications are also encountered by adults and are expressed in dreams, schizophrenic episodes, and other dissociated reactions. Sullivan believed that these nightmarish experiences are always preceded by a warning. When adults are struck by sudden severe anxiety, they are overcome by uncanny emotion. Although this experience incapacitates peo​ple in their interpersonal relationships, it serves as a valuable signal for approaching schizophrenic reactions. Uncanny emotion may be experienced in dreams or may take the form of awe, horror, loathing, or a "chilly crawling" sensation (Sullivan, 1953b).

Eidetic Personifications

Not all interpersonal relations are with real people; some are eidetic personifica​tions: that is, unrealistic traits or imaginary friends that many children invent in order to protect their self-esteem. Sullivan (1964) believed that these imaginary friends may be as significant to a child's development as real playmates.

Eidetic personifications, however, are not limited to children; most adults see fictitious traits in other people. Eidetic personifications can create conflict in inter​personal relations when people project onto others imaginary traits that are remnants from previous relationships. They also hinder communication and prevent people from functioning on the same level of cognition.

Levels of Cognition

Sullivan divided cognition into three levels or modes of experience: prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic. Levels of cognition refer to ways of perceiving, imagining, and conceiving. Experiences on the prototaxic level are impossible to communicate; parataxic experiences are personal, prelogical, and communicated only in distorted form; and syntaxic cognition is meaningful interpersonal communication.

Prototaxic Level

The earliest and most primitive experiences of an infant take place on a prototaxic level. Because these experiences cannot be communicated to others, they are diffi​cult to describe or define. One way to understand the term is to imagine the earliest subjective experiences of a newborn baby. These experiences must, in some way, re​late to different zones of the body. A neonate feels hunger and pain, and these pro​totaxic experiences result in observable action, for example, sucking or crying. The infant does not know the reason for the actions and sees no relationship between

these actions and being fed. As undifferentiated experiences, prototaxic events are beyond conscious recall.

In adults, prototaxic experiences take the form of momentary sensations, im​ages, feelings, moods, and impressions. These primitive images of dream and wak​ing life are dimly perceived or completely unconscious. Although people are inca​pable of communicating these images to others, they can sometimes tell another person that they have just had a strange sensation, one that they cannot put into words.

Parataxic Level

Parataxic experiences are prelogical and usually result when a person assumes a cause-and-effect relationship between two events that occur coincidentally. Parataxic cognitions are more clearly differentiated than prototaxic experiences, but their meaning remains private. Therefore, they can be communicated to others only in a distorted fashion.

An example of parataxic thinking takes place when a child is conditioned to say "please" in order to receive candy. If "candy and "please" occur together a num​ber of times, the child may eventually reach the illogical conclusion that her suppli​cations caused the candy's appearance. This conclusion is a parataxic distortion, or an illogical belief that a cause-and-effect relationship exists between two events in close temporal proximity. However, uttering the word "please" does not, by itself, cause the candy to appear. A dispensing person must be present who hears the word and is able and willing to honor the request. When no such person is present, a child may ask God or imaginary people to grant favors. A good bit of adult behavior comes from similar parataxic thinking.

Syntaxic Level

Experiences that are consensually validated and that can be symbolically communi​cated take place on a syntaxic level. Consensually validated experiences are those on whose meaning two or more persons agree. Words, for example, are consensually validated because different people more or less agree on their meaning. The most common symbols used by one person to communicate with another are those of lan​guage, including words and gestures.

Sullivan hypothesized that the first instance of syntaxic cognition appears whenever a sound or gesture begins to have the same meaning for parents as it does for a child. The syntaxic level of cognition becomes more prevalent as the child be​gins to develop formal language, but it never completely supplants prototaxic and parataxic cognition. Adult experience takes place on all three levels.

In summary, Sullivan identified two kinds of experience—tensions and energy transformations. Tensions, or potentiality for action, include needs and anxiety. Whereas needs are helpful or conjunctive when satisfied, anxiety is always disjunc​tive, interfering with the satisfaction of needs and disrupting interpersonal relations. Energy transformations literally involve the transformation of potential energy into actual energy (behavior) for the purpose of satisfying needs or reducing anxiety. Some of these behaviors form consistent patterns of behavior called dynamisms. Sul​livan also recognized three levels of cognition—prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic. Table 8.1 summarizes Sullivan's concept of personality.

Summary of Sullivan's Theory of Personality

I. Tensions (potential for action)

A. Needs (conjunctive; they help integrate personality)

1. General needs (facilitate the overall well-being of a person)

a. Interpersonal (tenderness, intimacy, and love)

b. Physiological (food, oxygen, water, and so forth)

2. Zonal needs (may also satisfy general needs)

a. Oral

b. Genital

c. Manual

B. Anxiety (disjunctive; it interferes with the satisfaction of needs)

II. Energy Transformations (overt or covert actions designed to satisfy needs or to

reduce anxiety. Some energy transformations become relatively consistent patterns of behavior called dynamisms)

HI. Dynan/isms (traits or behavioral patterns)

A. Malevolence (a feeling of living in enemy country)

B. Intimacy (an integrating experience marked by a close personal relationship with another person who is more or less of equal status)

C. Lust (an isolating dynamism characterized by an impersonal sexual interest in another person)

IV. Levels of Cognitions (ways of perceiving, imagining, and conceiving)

A. Prototaxic (undifferentiated experiences that are completely personal)

B. Parataxic (prelogical experiences that are communicated to others only in a distorted fashion)

C. Syntaxic (consensually validated experiences that can be accurately communicated to others)

Stages of Development

Sullivan (1953b) postulated seven epochs or stages of development, each crucial to the formation of human personality. The thread of interpersonal relations runs throughout the stages; other people are indispensable to a person's development from infancy to mature adulthood.

Personality change can take place at any time, but it is most likely to occur dur​ing the transition from one stage to the next. In fact, these threshold periods are more crucial than the stages themselves. Experiences previously dissociated or selectively inattended may enter into the self-system during one of the transitional periods. Sullivan hypothesized that, "as one passes over one of these more-or-less deter​minable thresholds of a developmental era, everything that has gone before becomes

reasonably open to influence" (p. 227). His seven stages are infancy, childhood, the juvenile era, preadolescence, early adolescence, late adolescence, and adulthood.

Infancy

Infancy begins at birth and continues until a child develops articulate or syntaxic speech, usually at about age 18 to 24 months. Sullivan believed that an infant be​comes human through tenderness received from the mothering one. The satisfaction of nearly every human need demands the cooperation of another person. Infants can​not survive without a mothering one to provide food, shelter, moderate temperature, physical contact, and the cleansing of waste materials.

The emphatic linkage between mother and infant leads inexorably to the de​velopment of anxiety for the baby. Being human, the mother enters the relationship with some degree of previously learned anxiety. Her anxiety may spring from any one of a variety of experiences, but the infant's first anxiety is always associated with the nursing situation and the oral zone. Unlike that of the mother, the infant's reper​toire of behaviors is not adequate to handle anxiety. So, whenever infants feel anx​ious (a condition originally transmitted to it by the mother), they try whatever means available to reduce anxiety. These attempts typically include rejecting the nipple, but this neither reduces anxiety nor satisfies the need for food. An infant's rejection of the nipple, of course, is not responsible for the mother's original anxiety but now adds to it. Eventually the infant discriminates between the good-nipple and the bad-nipple: the former being associated with relative euphoria in the feeding process; the latter, with enduring anxiety (Sullivan, 1953b).

An infant expresses both anxiety and hunger through crying. The mothering one may mistake anxiety for hunger and force the nipple onto an anxious (but not hungry) infant. The opposite situation may also take place when a mother, for what​ever reason, fails to satisfy the baby's needs. The baby then will experience rage, which increases the mother's anxiety and interferes with her ability to cooperate with her baby. With mounting tension, the infant loses the capacity to receive satisfaction, but the need for food, of course, continues to increase. Finally, as tension approaches terror, the infant experiences difficulty with breathing. The baby may even stop breathing and turn a bluish color, but the built-in protections of apathy and somno​lent detachment keep the infant from death. Apathy and somnolent detachment allow the infant to fall asleep despite the hunger (Sullivan, 1953b).

During the feeding process, the infant not only receives food but also satisfies some tenderness needs. The tenderness received by the infant at this time demands the cooperation of the mothering one and introduces the infant to the various strate​gies required by the interpersonal situation. The mother-infant relationship, however, is like a two-sided coin. The infant develops a dual personification of mother, seeing her as both good and bad; the mother is good when she satisfies the baby's needs and bad when she stimulates anxiety.

Around midinfancy, infants begin to learn how to communicate through lan​guage. In the beginning, their language is not consensually validated but takes place on an individualized or parataxic level. This period of infancy is characterized by autistic language, that is, private language that makes little or no sense to other peo​ple. Early communication takes place in the form of facial expressions and the

sounding of various phonemes. Both are learned through imitation, and eventually gestures and speech sounds have the same meaning for the infant as they do for other people. This communication marks the beginning of syntaxic language and the end of infancy.

Childhood

The era of childhood begins with the advent of syntaxic language and continues until the appearance of the need for playmates of an equal status. The age of childhood varies from culture to culture and from individual to individual, but in Western society it covers the period from about age 18 to 24 months until about age 5 or 6 years.

During this stage, the mother remains the most significant other person, but her role is different from what it was in infancy. The dual personifications of mother are now fused into one, and the child's perception of the mother is more congruent with the "real" mother. Nevertheless, the good-mother and bad-mother personifica​tions are usually retained on a parataxic level. In addition to combining the mother personifications, the child differentiates the various persons who previously formed the concept of the mothering one, separating mother and father and seeing each as having a distinct role.

At about the same time, children are fusing the me-personifications into a sin​gle self-dynamism. Once they establish syntaxic language, they can no longer con​sciously deal with the bad-me and good-me at the same time; now they label behav​iors as good or bad in imitation of their parents. However, these labels differ from the old personifications of infancy because they are symbolized on a syntaxic level and originate from children's behavior rather than from decreases or increases in their anxiety. Also, good and bad now imply social or moral value and no longer refer to the absence or presence of that painful tension called anxiety.

During childhood, emotions become reciprocal; a child is able to give tender​ness as well as receive it. The relationship between mother and child becomes more personal and less one-sided. Rather than seeing the mother as good or bad based on how she satisfied hunger needs, the child evaluates the mother syntaxically accord​ing to whether she shows reciprocal tender feelings, develops a relationship based on the mutual satisfaction of needs, or exhibits a rejecting attitude.

Besides their parents, preschool-aged children often have one other significant relationship—an imaginary playmate. This eidetic friend enables children to have a safe, secure relationship that produces little anxiety. Parents sometimes observe their preschool-aged children talking to an imaginary friend, calling the friend by name, and possibly even insisting that an extra place be set at the table or space be made available in the car or the bed for this playmate. Also, many adults can recall their own childhood experiences with imaginary playmates. Sullivan insisted that having an imaginary playmate is not a sign of instability or pathology but a positive event that helps children become ready for intimacy with real friends during the preado​lescence stage. These playmates offer children an opportunity to interact with an​other "person" who is safe and who will not increase their level of anxiety. This com​fortable, nonthreatening relationship with an imaginary playmate permits children to be more independent of parents and to make friends in later years.

Sullivan (1953b) referred to childhood as a period of rapid acculturation. Be​sides acquiring language, children learn cultural patterns of cleanliness, toilet train​ing, eating habits, and sex-role expectancies. They also learn two other important processes: dramatizations and preoccupations. Dramatizations are attempts to act like or sound like significant authority figures, especially mother and father. Preoc​cupations are strategies for avoiding anxiety and fear-provoking situations by re​maining occupied with an activity that has earlier proved useful or rewarding.

The malevolent attitude reaches a peak during the preschool years, giving some children an intense feeling of living in a hostile or enemy country. At the same time, children learn that society has placed certain restraints on their freedom. From these restrictions and from experiences with approval and disapprobation, children evolve their self-dynamism, which helps them handle anxiety and stabilize their per​sonality. In fact, the self-system introduces so much stability that it makes future changes exceedingly difficult.

Juvenile Era

The juvenile era begins with the appearance of the need for peers or playmates of equal status and ends when one finds a single chum to satisfy the need for intimacy. In the United States, the juvenile stage is roughly parallel to the first 3 years of school, beginning around age 5 or 6 and ending at about age 81/2. (It is interesting that Sullivan was so specific with the age at which this period ends and the preado​lescent stage begins. Remember that Sullivan was 8 I/2 when he began an intimate re​lationship with a 13-year-old boy from a nearby farm.)

During the juvenile stage, Sullivan believed, a child should learn to compete, compromise, and cooperate. The degree of competition found among children of this

During the juvenile stage, children need to learn competition, cooperation, and compromise.

age varies with the culture, but Sullivan believed that people in the United States have generally overemphasized competition. Many children believe that they must be competitive to be successful. Compromise, too, can be overdone. A 7-year-old child who learns to continually give in to others is handicapped in the socialization process, and this yielding trait may continue to characterize the person in later life. Cooperation includes all those processes necessary to get along with others. The juvenile-age child must learn to cooperate with others in the real world of interper​sonal relationships. Cooperation is a critical step in becoming socialized and is the most important task confronting children during this stage of development.

During the juvenile era, children associate with other children who are of equal standing. One-to-one relationships are rare, but if they exist, they are more likely to be based on convenience than on genuine intimacy. Boys and girls play with one an​other with little regard for the gender of the other person. Although permanent dyadic (two-person) relationships are still in the future, children of this age are be​ginning to make discriminations among themselves and to distinguish among adults. They see one teacher as kinder than another, one parent as more indulgent. The real world is coming more into focus, allowing them to operate increasingly on the syn​taxic level.

By the end of the juvenile stage, a child should have developed an orientation toward living that makes it easier to consistently handle anxiety, satisfy zonal and tenderness needs, and set goals based on memory and foresight. This orientation to​ward living readies a person for the deeper interpersonal relationships to follow (Sul​livan, 1953b).

Preadolescence

Preadolescence, which begins at age 81/2 and ends with adolescence, is a time for in​timacy with one particular person, usually a person of the same gender. All preced​ing stages have been egocentric, with friendships being formed on the basis of self-interest. A preadolescent, for the first time, takes a genuine interest in the other person. Sullivan (1953a) called this process of becoming a social being the "quiet miracle of preadolescence" (p. 41), a likely reference to the personality transforma​tion he experienced during his own preadolescence.

The outstanding characteristic of preadolescence is the genesis of the capacity to love. Previously, all interpersonal relationships were based on personal need sat​isfaction, but during preadolescence, intimacy and love become the essence of friendships. Intimacy involves a relationship in which the two partners consensually validate one another's personal worth. Love exists "when the satisfaction or the se​curity of another person becomes as significant to one as is one's own satisfaction or security" (Sullivan, 1953a, pp. 42-43).

A preadolescent's intimate relationship ordinarily involves another person of the same gender and of approximately the same age or social status. Infatuations with teachers or movie stars are not intimate relationships because they are not con​sensually validated. The significant relationships of this age are typically boy-boy or girl-girl chumships. To be liked by one's peers is more important to the preadoles​cent than to be liked by teachers or parents. Chums are able to freely express opin​ions and emotions to one another without fear of humiliation or embarrassment. This

free exchange of personal thoughts and feelings initiates the preadolescent into the world of intimacy. Each chum becomes more fully human, acquires an expanded personality, and develops a wider interest in the humanity of all people.

Sullivan believed that preadolescence is the most untroubled and carefree time of life. Parents are still significant, even though they have been reappraised in a more realistic light. Preadolescents can experience unselfish love that has not yet been complicated by lust. The cooperation they acquired during the juvenile era evolves into collaboration or the capacity to work with another, not for self-prestige, but for the well-being of that other.

Experiences during preadolescence are critical for the future development of personality. If children do not learn intimacy at this time, they are likely to be seri​ously stunted in later personality growth. However, earlier negative influences can be extenuated by the positive effects of an intimate relationship. Even the malevolent attitude can be reversed, and many other juvenile problems, such as loneliness and self-centeredness, are diminished by the achievement of intimacy. In other words, mistakes made during earlier stages of development can be overcome during pread​olescence, but mistakes made during preadolescence are difficult to surmount dur​ing later stages. The relatively brief and uncomplicated period of preadolescence is shattered by the onset of puberty.

Early Adolescence

Early adolescence begins with puberty and ends with the need for sexual love with one person. It is marked by the eruption of genital interest and the advent of lustful relationships. In the United States, early adolescence is generally parallel with the middle-school years. As with most other stages, however, Sullivan placed no great emphasis on chronological age.

The need for intimacy achieved during the preceding stage continues during early adolescence, but is now accompanied by a parallel but separate need—lust. In addition, security, or the need to be free from anxiety, remains active during early adolescence. Thus, intimacy, lust, and security often collide with one another, bring​ing stress and conflict to the young adolescent in at least three ways. First, lust in​terferes with security operations because genital activity in American culture is fre​quently ingrained with anxiety, guilt, and embarrassment. Second, intimacy also can threaten security, as when young adolescents seek intimate friendships with other-gender adolescents. These attempts are fraught with self-doubt, uncertainty, and ridicule from others, which may lead to loss of self-esteem and an increase in anxi​ety. Third, intimacy and lust are frequently in conflict during early adolescence. Al​though intimate friendships with peers of equal status are still important, powerful genital tensions seek outlet without regard for the intimacy need. Therefore, young adolescents may retain their intimate friendships from preadolescence while feeling lust for people they neither like nor even know.

Because the lust dynamism is biological, it bursts forth at puberty regardless of the individual's interpersonal readiness for it. A boy with no previous experience with intimacy may see girls as sex objects, while having no real interest in them. An early adolescent girl may sexually tease boys but lack the ability to relate to them on an intimate level.

The early adolescent's search for intimacy can increase anxiety and threaten secu Y.

Sullivan (1953b) believed that early adolescence is a turning point in person​ality development. The person either emerges from this stage in command of the in​timacy and lust dynamisms or faces serious interpersonal difficulties during future stages. Although sexual adjustment is important to personality development, Sulli​van felt that the real issue lies in getting along with other people.

Late Adolescence

Late adolescence begins when young people are able to feel both lust and intimacy toward the same person, and it ends in adulthood when they establish a lasting love relationship. Late adolescence embraces that period of self-discovery when adoles​cents are determining their preferences in genital behavior, usually during secondary school years, or about ages 15 to 17 or 18.

The outstanding feature of late adolescence is the fusion of intimacy and lust. The troubled attempts at self-exploration of early adolescence evolve into a stable pattern of sexual activity in which the loved one is also the object of lustful interest. People of the other gender are no longer desired solely as sex objects but as people who are capable of being loved nonselfishly. Unlike the previous stage that was ush​ered in by biological changes, late adolescence is completely determined by inter​personal relations.

Successful late adolescence includes a growing syntaxic mode. At college or in the workplace, late adolescents begin exchanging ideas with others and having their opinions and beliefs either validated or repudiated. They learn from others how to live in the adult world, but a successful journey through the earlier stages facili​tates this adjustment. If previous developmental epochs were unsuccessful, young

232 Part Ii Psychodynamic Theories
	people come to late ado​lescence with no intimate interpersonal relations, inconsistent patterns of sexual activity, and a great need to maintain se​curity operations. They rely heavily on the parataxic mode to avoid anxiety and strive to pre​serve self-esteem through selective inattention, dis​sociation, and neurotic symptoms. They face seri​ous problems in bridging the gulf between society's expectations and their own inability to form intimate relations with persons of the other gender. Believ​ing that love is a universal condition of young peo​ple, they are often pres‑

sured into "falling in love." However, only the mature person has the capacity to love; others merely go through the motions of being "in love" in order to maintain security (Sullivan, 1953b).

Adulthood

The successful completion of late adolescence culminates in adulthood, a period when people can establish a love relationship with at least one significant other per​son. Writing of this love relationship, Sullivan (1953b) stated that "this really highly developed intimacy with another is not the principal business of life, but is, perhaps, the principal source of satisfaction in life" (p. 34).

Sullivan had little to say about this final stage because he believed that mature adulthood was beyond the scope of interpersonal psychiatry; people who have achieved the capacity to love are not in need of psychiatric counsel. His sketch of the mature person, therefore, was not founded on clinical experience but was an extrap​olation from the preceding stages.

Mature adults are perceptive of other people's anxiety, needs, and security. They operate predominantly on the syntaxic level, and find life interesting and ex​citing (Sullivan, 1953b).

Table 8.2 summarizes the first six Sullivanian stages of development and shows the importance of interpersonal relationships at each stage.

Summary of Sullivan's Stages of Development

Significant Interpersonal

Stage Age Others Process

Infancy 0 to 2 Mothering one Tenderness

Childhood 2 to 6 Parents Protect security

through imaginary playmates

Juvenile era 6 to 81/2 Playmates of Orientation

equal status toward living in the world of peers

Preadolescence 81/2 to 13 Single chum Intimacy

Important Learnings Good mother/

bad mother;

good me/bad

me

Syntaxic language

Competition, compromise, cooperation

Affection and respect from peers

Balance of lust,

intimacy and security operations

Discovery of self and the world

outside of self

Psychological Disorders

Sullivan believed that all psychological disorders have an interpersonal origin and can be understood only with reference to the patient's social environment. He also held that the deficiencies found in psychiatric patients are found in every person, but to a lesser degree. There is nothing unique about psychological difficulties; they are derived from the same kind of interpersonal troubles faced by all people. Sullivan (1953a) insisted that "everyone is much more simply human than unique, and that no matter what ails the patient, he is mostly a person like the psychiatrist" (p. 96).

Most of Sullivan's early therapeutic work was with schizophrenic patients, and many of his subsequent lectures and writings dealt with schizophrenia. Sullivan (1962) distinguished two broad classes of schizophrenia. The first included all those symptoms that originate from organic causes and are therefore beyond the study of interpersonal psychiatry. The second class included all schizophrenic disorders

grounded in situational factors. These disorders were the only ones of concern to Sullivan because they are the only ones amenable to change through interpersonal psychiatry.

Dissociated reactions, which often precede schizophrenia, are characterized by loneliness, low self-esteem, the uncanny emotion, unsatisfactory relations with oth​ers, and ever-increasing anxiety (Sullivan, 1953b). People with a dissociated per​sonality, in common with all people, attempt to minimize anxiety by building an elaborate self-system that blocks out those experiences that threaten their security. Whereas normal individuals feel relatively secure in their interpersonal relations and do not need to constantly rely on dissociation as a means of protecting self-esteem, mentally disordered individuals dissociate many of their experiences from their self-system. If this strategy becomes persistent, these people will begin to increasingly operate in their own private worlds, with increasing parataxic distortions and de​creasing consensually validated experiences (Sullivan, 1956).

Psychotherapy

Because he believed that psychic disorders grow out of interpersonal difficulties, Sullivan based his therapeutic procedures on an effort to improve a patient's rela​tionship with others. To facilitate this process, the therapist serves as a participant observer; becoming part of an interpersonal, face-to-face relationship with the pa​tient and providing the patient an opportunity to establish syntaxic communication with another human being.

While at St. Elizabeth Hospital, Sullivan devised a then radical means of treat​ing seriously disturbed patients. His supervisors agreed to grant him a ward for his own patients and to allow him to select and train paraprofessional workers who could treat the patients as fellow human beings. At that time, most schizophrenic and other psychotic patients were warehoused and regarded as subhuman. But Sullivan's ex​periment worked. A high rate of his patients got better. Erich Fromm (1994) re​garded Sullivan's near miraculous results as evidence that a psychosis is not merely a physical disorder and that the personal relationship of one human being to another is the essence of psychological growth.

In general terms, Sullivanian therapy is aimed at uncovering patients' difficul​ties in relating to others. To accomplish this goal, the therapist helps patients to give up some security in dealing with other people and to realize that they can achieve mental health only through consensually validated personal relations. The therapeu​tic ingredient in this process is the face-to-face relationship between therapist and patients, which permits patients to reduce anxiety and to communicate with others on the syntaxic level.

Although they are participants in the interview, Sullivanian therapists avoid getting personally involved. They do not place themselves on the same level with the patient; on the contrary, they try to convince the patient of their expert abilities. In other words, friendship is not a condition of psychotherapy—therapists must be trained as experts in the difficult business of making discerning observations of the patient's interpersonal relations (Sullivan, 1954).

Sullivan was primarily concerned with understanding patients and helping them improve foresight, discover difficulties in interpersonal relations, and restore

their ability to participate in consensually validated experiences. To accomplish these goals, he concentrated his efforts on answering three continuing questions: Precisely what is the patient saying to me? How can I best put into words what I wish to say to the patient? What is the general pattern of communication between us?

Related Research

Sullivan's interpersonal theory of personality rests on the assumption that unhealthy personality development results from interpersonal conflicts and difficulties. Begin​ning around the age of 6, and especially by the age of 9, children's relationships with peers their own age become increasingly important for personality development. Sullivan particularly emphasized the importance of same-sex friends and used the term "chums" to describe this specific category of peers. In this section we review some recent research on the dynamics of same-sex friendships in childhood and how they can be simultaneously helpful and harmful for healthy development depending on certain factors.

The Pros and Cons of "Chums" for Girls and Boys

Harry Stack Sullivan, like countless other psychologists, considered friends during childhood and adolescence to be crucial to developing into a healthy adult. Friends are a source of social support, and it is comforting to lean on them when times are tough or when you're having a bad day. Friends may be particularly important dur​ing childhood because children do not have the same advanced coping mechanisms that adults have and sometimes struggle to deal with issues like being rejected by a peer. In situations like these it is important to have a friend, or a "chum" to use Sul​livan's language, to talk to. But recently, psychologists have begun investigating the potentially harmful aspects of social support in childhood. It may seem counterintu​itive to suggest that having friends can be a bad thing, but sometimes the dynamics of a particular friendship can actually be damaging.

Rumination is one such dynamic that can have a negative impact on children's well-being. Ruminating is the act of dwelling on a negative event or negative aspects of an otherwise neutral or even positive event and is generally considered to be harmful as it is associated with an increase in depression. When rumination occurs in the context of a friendship, it is called co-rumination, which is defined as exces​sively discussing personal problems within a relationship (Rose, Carlson, & Waller, 2007). While generally speaking, Sullivan had it right when he emphasized the im​portance of childhood friendships in his interpersonal theory of personality, one of the most important attributes of science is to question previously held assumptions.

And this is exactly what Amanda Rose and her colleagues have begun doing in their research on how, in some cases, friendships can be damaging. Specifically, Rose and colleagues are interested in the negative impact of co-rumination in child​hood friendships (Rose, 2002; Rose et al., 2007).

To investigate the existence of co-rumination in childhood relationships and the impact of co-rumination on children's well-being, Amanda Rose and colleagues conducted a longitudinal study of children in elementary and middle school. The re​searchers went into local schools and recruited almost 1,000 children in third, fifth,

seventh, and ninth grades to participate in the study. Toward the beginning of the school year, all participants completed self-report measures of depression and anxi​ety and also rated their friendships on overall quality and co-rumination. The items for co-rumination within friendships consisted of statements like "When we talk about a problem that one of us has, we usually talk about that problem every day even if nothing new has happened" and "When we talk about a problem that one of us has, we try to figure out everything about the problem, even if there are parts that we may never understand" (Rose et al., 2007, p. 1022). As these sample items demonstrate, co-rumination is not a constructive process by which a child works through a problem with a friend. Rather, co-rumination involves dwelling on the neg​ative even when there is no solution to be found and no good that can come of it.

The researchers returned to the schools toward the end of the school year and once again had participants complete measures of depression, anxiety, and friend​ship quality. Nearly all of the children reported that their closest friends were same-sex (or "chums" as Sullivan would call them), so the researchers focused on these friendships. Overall, co-rumination in same-sex friendships was related to increased feelings of depression and anxiety but was also related to greater friendship quality (Rose et al., 2007). In other words, although co-rumination did increase negative feelings, it was not all negative because it was also a sign of a good friendship. This makes sense because constantly dwelling on negative events will understandably lead one to feel more depressed, but disclosing your feelings to friends can make you feel closer to that person and generally improve the relationship.

The researchers were also interested in whether co-rumination functions dif​ferently in boys and girls. Are girls more likely to engage in co-rumination than boys? Is co-rumination better for girls than boys or vice versa? Before her study on co-rumination, Rose and a colleague conducted a review of research on the friend​ships of boys and girls (Rose & Rudolph, 2006). What they found was that boys and girls engage in very different activities within their friendships on a daily basis. For example, girls spend more time talking, and particularly engaging in self-disclosure, whereas boys are more likely to engage in rough-and-tumble play together. Girls also report placing a greater importance on their friendships than do boys. These findings indicate that there are different dynamics within same-sex friendships for girls and boys.

Returning to the longitudinal study of children and their same-sex friends, Rose and colleagues looked for sex differences in the effects of co-rumination on de​pression, anxiety, and overall friendship quality. What they found was quite interest​ing because co-rumination was particularly bad for girls but not so bad for boys. For girls, the overall effects previously described held up: Co-rumination was associated with increased depression and anxiety but also with better friendships. For boys, however, co-rumination was associated with better friendships but was not related to increased depression or anxiety. These findings make clear that there are very dif​ferent dynamics functioning in the same-sex friendships of boys and girls and that the implications can be profound.

Many times when a parent, therapist, or school counselor evaluates whether or not a child is at risk for depression or other psychological issues, they check to make sure the child has a supportive friend group or "chums." Amanda Rose's research shows that for boys, having a supportive friend may well be sufficient to ward off

depression and anxiety. For girls, however, the research paints a different picture: If girls are engaging in co-rumination with their friends, then no matter how supportive those friends are and no matter how good the friendship is, girls are at increased risk for developing depression.

Imaginary Friends

More than any other personality theorist, Sullivan recognized the importance of hav​ing an imaginary friend, especially during the childhood stage. He believed that these friendships can facilitate independence from parents and help children build real re​lationships. In support of Sullivan's notion, research has found that children do tend to view imaginary friends as a source of nurturance (Gleason, 2002; Gleason & Hohmann, 2006). Moreover, evidence supports Sullivan's theory that children who develop imaginary friends—in contrast to those who do not—are more creative, imaginary, intelligent, friendly, and sociable (Fern, 1991; Gleason, 2002). Of course it's hard to get by on imaginary friends alone, but there is some evidence that sug​gests imaginary friends are just as important as real friends, at least in the eyes of children (Gleason & Hohmann, 2006).

To explore how children view imaginary friends in relation to their real friends, Tracy Gleason and Lisa Hohmann (2006) conducted a study of preschool-age children. The researchers had 84 children enrolled in preschool complete an ac​tivity in which they listed who their friends were at preschool, described their imag​inary friend if they had one, and rated each friend (including the imaginary ones) on several dimensions. Specifically, the children rated how much they liked playing with each friend, whether they told secrets to one another, how much they liked each friend in general, and how good each friend made them feel about their own abili​ties. Of course, because the participants in this study were young children, they could not respond to a standard self-report measure. Instead, the questions were read aloud to each child, and the questions were carefully worded to use language that preschoolers could easily understand. Additionally, because children can get con​fused easily, their responses had to be corroborated by their parents and preschool teachers.

What Gleason and Hohmann (2006) found was generally supportive of Sullivan's notion that imaginary friends are important and help to model how real friendships should work. Twenty-six percent of the preschoolers sampled reported having an imaginary friend and that their imaginary friend was a source of real sup​port and one of their highest rated sources of enjoyment (Gleason & Hohmann, 2006). The researchers were also able to compare children's ratings of imaginary friends with those of their real friends and found that imaginary friends very closely modeled the enjoyment derived from reciprocal friendships but not that derived from friendships that were essentially one-way. That is, relationships with imaginary friends were enjoyable at about the same level as those friendships in which both children described each other as friends (a reciprocal friendship), but not in which one child says the other is a friend but the other one does not reciprocate (one-way friendships).

In summary, research tends to support Sullivan's assumptions that having an imaginary playmate is a normal, healthy experience It is neither a sign of pathology

nor a result of feelings of loneliness and alienation from other children. Indeed, imaginary friends not only may serve as a source of enjoyment but also may have the more important purpose of modeling for children what a truly good, mutually enjoy​able friendship should be so that they can avoid bad relationships as they grow and mature into healthy adults.

Critique of Sullivan

Although Sullivan's theory of personality is quite comprehensive, it is not as popular among academic psychologists as the theories of Freud, Adler, Jung, or Erik Erikson (see Chapter 9). However, the ultimate value of any theory does not rest on its pop​ularity but on the six criteria enumerated in Chapter 1.

The first criterion of a useful theory is its ability to generate research. Cur​rently, few researchers are actively investigating hypotheses specifically drawn from Sullivan's theory. One possible explanation for this deficiency is Sullivan's lack of popularity among researchers most apt to conduct research—the academicians. This lack of popularity might be accounted for by Sullivan's close association with psy​chiatry, his isolation from any university setting, and the relative lack of organization in his writings and speeches.

Second, a useful theory must be falsifiable; that is, it must be specific enough to suggest research that may either support or fail to support its major assumptions. On this criterion, Sullivan's theory, like those of Freud, Jung, and Fromm, must re​ceive a very low mark. Sullivan's notion of the importance of interpersonal relations for psychological health has received a moderate amount of indirect support. How​ever, alternative explanations are possible for most of these findings.

Third, how well does Sullivanian theory provide an organization for all that is known about human personality? Despite its many elaborate postulates, the theory can receive only a moderate rating on its ability to organize knowledge. Moreover, the the​ory's extreme emphasis on interpersonal relations subtracts from its ability to organize knowledge, because much of what is presently known about human behavior has a bi​ological basis and does not easily fit into a theory restricted to interpersonal relations.

The relative lack of testing of Sullivan's theory diminishes its usefulness as a practical guide for parents, teachers, psychotherapists, and others concerned with the care of children and adolescents. However, if one accepts the theory without sup​porting evidence, then many practical problems can be managed by resorting to Sul​livanian theory. As a guide to action, then, the theory receives a fair to moderate rating.

Is the theory internally consistent? Sullivan's ideas suffer from his inability to write well, but the theory itself is logically conceptualized and holds together as a unified entity. Although Sullivan used some unusual terms, he did so in a consistent fashion throughout his writings and speeches. Overall, his theory is consistent, but it lacks the organization he might have achieved if he had committed more of his ideas to the printed page.

Finally, is the theory parsimonious, or simple? Here Sullivan must receive a low rating. His penchant for creating his own terms and the awkwardness of his writ​ing add needless bulk to a theory that, if streamlined, would be far more useful.

Concept of Humanity

Sullivan's basic conception of humanity is summed up in his one-genus hypothesis, which states that "everyone is much more simply human than otherwise" (1953b, p. 32). This hypothesis was his way of saying that similarities among people are much more important than differences. People are more like people than anything else.

In other words, the differences between any two instances of human personality—from the lowest-grade imbecile to the highest-grade genius are much less

striking than the difference between the least-gifted human being and a member of the nearest other biological genus. (p. 33)

Sullivan's ability to successfully treat schizophrenic patients undoubtedly was greatly enhanced by his deeply held belief that they shared a common humanity with the therapist. Having experienced at least one schizophrenic episode himself, Sullivan was able to form an empathic bond with these patients through his role as a participant observer.

The one influence separating humans from all other creatures is interpersonal relations. People are born biological organisms—animals with no human qualities except the potential for participation in interpersonal relations. Soon after birth, they begin to realize their potential when interpersonal experiences transform them into human beings. Sullivan believed that the mind contains nothing except what was put there through interpersonal experiences. People are not motivated by in​stincts but by those environmental influences that come through interpersonal re​lationships.

Children begin life with a somewhat one-sided relationship with a mothering one who both cares for their needs and increases their anxiety. Later, they become able to reciprocate feelings for the mothering one, and this relationship between child and parent serves as a foundation on which subsequent interpersonal rela​tions are built. At about the time children enter the first grade at school, they are exposed to competition, cooperation, and compromise with other children. If they handle these tasks successfully, they obtain the tools necessary for intimacy and love that come later. Through their intimate and love relationships, they become healthy personalities. However, an absence of healthy interpersonal relationships leads to stunted psychological growth.

Personal individuality is an illusion; people exist only in relation to other people and have as many personalities as they have interpersonal relations. Thus, the concepts of uniqueness and individuality are of little concern to Sullivan's in​terpersonal theory.

Anxiety and interpersonal relations are tied together in a cyclic manner, which makes significant personality changes difficult. Anxiety interferes with in​terpersonal relations, and unsatisfactory interpersonal relations lead to the use of rigid behaviors that may temporarily buffer anxiety. But because these inflexible be​haviors do not solve the basic problem, they eventually lead to higher levels of anx​iety, which lead to further deterioration in interpersonal relations. The increasing

anxiety must then be held in check by an ever-rigid self-system. For this rea​son, we rate Sullivan's theory as neither optimistic nor pessimistic concerning the potential for growth and change. Interpersonal relations can transform a person into either a healthy personality or one marked by anxiety and a rigid self-structure. Because Sullivan believed that personality is built solely on interpersonal re​lations, we rate his theory very high on social influence. Interpersonal relations are responsible for both positive and negative characteristics in people. Infants who have their needs satisfied by the mothering one will not be greatly disturbed by their mother's anxiety, will receive genuine feelings of tenderness, can avoid being a malevolent personality, and have the ability to develop tender feelings toward others. However, unsatisfactory interpersonal relations may trigger malevolence and leave some children with the feeling that people cannot be trusted and that they are essentially alone among their enemies.

Key Terms and Concepts

· People develop their personality through interpersonal relationships.

· Experience takes place on three levels—prototaxic (primitive, presymbolic), par-ataxic (not accurately communicated to others), and syntaxic (accurate communication).

· Two aspects of experience are tensions (potential for action) and energy transformations (actions or behaviors).

· Tensions are of two kinds—needs and anxiety.

· Needs are conjunctive in that they facilitate interpersonal development.

· Anxiety is disjunctive in that it interferes with the satisfaction of needs and is the primary obstacle to establishing healthy interpersonal relationships.

· Energy transformations become organized into consistent traits or behavior patterns called dynamisms.

· Typical dynamisms include malevolence (a feeling of living in enemy country), intimacy (a close interpersonal relationship with a peer of equal status, and lust (impersonal sexual desires).

· Sullivan's chief contribution to personality was his concept of various developmental stages.

· The first developmental stage is infancy (from birth to the development of syntaxic language), a time when an infant's primary interpersonal relationship is with the mothering one.

· During childhood (from syntaxic language to the need for playmates of equal status), the mother continues as the most important interpersonal relationship, although children of this age often have an imaginary playmate.

· The third stage is the juvenile era (from the need for playmates of equal status to the development of intimacy), a time when children should learn

competition, compromise, and cooperation—skills that will enable them to move successfully through later stages of development.

· The most crucial stage of development is preadolescence (from intimacy with a best friend to the beginning of puberty). Mistakes made during this phase are difficult to overcome later.

· During early adolescence young people are motivated by both intimacy (usually for someone of the same gender) and lust (ordinarily for a person of the opposite gender).

· People reach late adolescence when they are able to direct their intimacy and lust toward one other person.

· The successful completion of late adolescence culminates in adulthood, a stage marked by a stable love relationship.

· With Sullivan's psychotherapy, the therapist serves as a participant observer and attempts to improve patients' interpersonal relations.

CHAPTER 9

Erikson: Post-Freudian

Theory

· Overview of Post-Freudian Theory

· Biography of Erik Erikson

· The Ego in Post-Freudian Theory Society's Influence

Epigenetic Principle

· Stages of Psychosocial Development Infancy

Early Childhood

Play Age

School Age

Adolescence

Young Adulthood

Adulthood

Old Age

Summary of the Life Cycle

4. Erikson's Methods of Investigation Anthropological Studies

Psychohistory

A

s a child, Erik Salomonsen had many questions but few answers about his bio​logical father. He knew who his mother was—a beautiful Jewish Dane whose

family tried hard to appear Danish rather than Jewish. But who was his father?

Born into a single-parent family, the young boy held three separate beliefs re​garding his origins. At first, he believed that his mother's husband, a physician named Theodor Homburger, was his biological father. However, as Erik matured, he began to realize that this was incorrect because his blond hair and blue eyes did not match the dark features of either parent. He pressed his mother for an explanation, but she lied to him and said that a man named Valdemar Salomonsen—her first husband—was his biological father and that he abandoned her after she became pregnant with Erik. However, Erik didn't quite believe this second story either because he learned that Salomonsen had left his mother 4 years before Erik was born. Finally, Erik chose to believe that he was the outcome of a sexual liaison between his mother and an ar​tistically gifted aristocratic Dane. For nearly the remainder of his life, Erik believed this third story. Nevertheless, he continued to search for his own identity while seek​ing the name of his biological father.

During his school days, Erik's Scandinavian features contributed to his iden​tity confusion. When he attended temple, his blue eyes and blond hair made him ap​pear to be an outsider. At public school, his Aryan classmates referred to him as a Jew, so Erik felt out of place in both arenas. Throughout his life, he had difficulty ac​cepting himself as either a Jew or a Gentile.

When his mother died, Erik, then 58 years old, feared he would never know the identity of his biological father. But he persevered in his search. Finally, more than 30 years later and as his mind and body began to deteriorate, Erik lost interest in learning his father's name. However, he continued to show some identity confusion. For example, he spoke mostly in German—the language of his youth—and rarely spoke in English, his primary language for more than 60 years. In addition, he re​tained a long-held affinity for Denmark and the Danish people and took perverted pride in displaying the flag of Denmark, a country in which he never lived.

Overview of Post-Freudian Theory

The person we introduced in the opening vignette, of course, was Erik Erikson, the person who coined the term identity crisis. Erikson had no college degree of any kind, but this lack of formal training did not prevent him from gaining world fame in an impressive variety of fields including psychoanalysis, anthropology, psy​chohistory, and education.

Unlike earlier psychodynamic theorists who severed nearly all ties to Freudian psychoanalysis, Erikson intended his theory of personality to extend rather than re​pudiate Freud's assumptions and to offer a new "way of looking at things" (Erikson, 1963, p. 403). His post-Freudian theory extended Freud's infantile developmental stages into adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Erikson suggested that at each stage a specific psychosocial struggle contributes to the formation of personality. From adolescence on, that struggle takes the form of an identity crisis—a turning point in one's life that may either strengthen or weaken personality.

Erikson regarded his post-Freudian theory as an extension of psychoanalysis, something Freud might have done in time. Although he used Freudian theory as the

foundation for his life-cycle approach to personality, Erikson differed from Freud in several respects. In addition to elaborating on psychosexual stages beyond child​hood, Erikson placed more emphasis on both social and historical influences.

Erikson's post-Freudian theory, like those of other personality theorists, is a re​flection of his background, a background that included art, extensive travels, experi​ences with a variety of cultures, and a lifelong search for his own identity, which we mentioned briefly in our opening story.

Biography of Erik Erikson

Who was Erik Erikson? Was he a Dane, a German, or an American? Jew or Gentile? Artist or psychoanalyst? Erikson himself had difficulty answering these questions, and he spent nearly a lifetime trying to determine who he was.

Born June 15, 1902, in southern Germany, Erikson was brought up by his mother and stepfather, but he remained uncertain of the true identity of his biologi​cal father. To discover his niche in life, Erikson ventured away from home during late adolescence, adopting the life of a wandering artist and poet. After nearly 7 years of drifting and searching, he returned home confused, exhausted, depressed, and unable to sketch or paint. At this time, a fortuitous event changed his life: He received a let​ter from his friend Peter Blos inviting him to teach children in a new school in Vi​enna. One of the founders of the school was Anna Freud, who became not only Erik-son's employer, but his psychoanalyst as well.

While undergoing analytic treatment, he stressed to Anna Freud that his most difficult problem was searching for the identity of his biological father. However, Ms. Freud was less than empathic and told Erikson that he should stop fantasizing about his absent father. Although Erikson usually obeyed his psychoanalyst, he could not take Freud's advice to stop trying to learn his father's name.

While in Vienna, Erikson met and, with Anna Freud's permission, married Joan Serson, a Canadian-born dancer, artist, and teacher who had also undergone psychoanalysis. With her psychoanalytic background and her facility with the En​glish language, she became a valuable editor and occasional coauthor of Erikson's books.

The Eriksons had four children: sons Kai, Jon, and Neil, and daughter Sue. Kai and Sue pursued important professional careers, but Jon, who shared his father's ex​perience as a wandering artist, worked as a laborer and never felt emotionally close to his parents.

Erikson's search for identity took him through some difficult experiences dur​ing his adult developmental stage (Friedman, 1999). According to Erikson, this stage requires a person to take care of children, products, and ideas that he or she has gen​erated. On this issue, Erikson was deficient in meeting his own standards. He failed to take good care of his son Neil, who was born with Down syndrome. At the hos​pital while Joan was still under sedation, Erik agreed to place Neil in an institution. Then he went home and told his three older children that their brother had died at birth. He lied to them much as his mother had lied to him about the identity of his biological father. Later, he told his oldest son, Kai, the truth, but he continued to de​ceive the two younger children, Jon and Sue. Although his mother's lie had distressed

him greatly, he failed to understand that his lie about Neil might later distress his other children. In deceiving his children the way he did, Erikson violated two of his own principles: "Don't lie to people you should care for," and "Don't pit one family member against another." To compound the situation, when Neil died at about age 20, the Eriksons, who were in Europe at the time, called Sue and Jon and instructed them to handle all the funeral arrangements for a brother they had never met and who they only recently knew existed (Friedman, 1999).

Erikson also sought his identity through the myriad changes of jobs and places of residence. Lacking any academic credentials, he had no specific professional identity and was variously known as an artist, a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, a cli​nician, a professor, a cultural anthropologist, an existentialist, a psychobiographer, and a public intellectual.

In 1933, with fascism on the rise in Europe, Erikson and his family left Vienna for Denmark, hoping to gain Danish citizenship. When Danish officials refused his request, he left Copenhagen and immigrated to the United States.

In America, he changed his name from Homburger to Erikson. This change was a crucial turning point in his life because it represented a retreat from his earlier Jewish identification. Originally, Erikson resented any implication that he was aban​doning his Jewish identity by changing his name. He countered these charges by pointing out that he used his full name—Erik Homburger Erikson—in his books and essays. However, as time passed, he dropped his middle name and replaced it with the initial H. Thus, this person who at the end of life was known as Erik H. Erikson had previously been called Erik Salomonsen, Erik Homburger, and Erik Homburger Erikson.

In America, Erikson continued his pattern of moving from place to place. He first settled in the Boston area where he set up a modified psychoanalytic practice. With neither medical credentials nor any kind of college degree, he accepted re​search positions at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard Psychological Clinic.

Wanting to write but needing more time than his busy schedule in Boston and Cambridge allowed, Erikson took a position at Yale in 1936, but after 21/2 years, he moved to the University of California at Berkeley, but not before living among and studying people of the Sioux nation on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. He later lived with people of the Yurok nation in northern California, and these ex​periences in cultural anthropology added to the richness and completeness of his concept of humanity.

During his California period, Erikson gradually evolved a theory of personal​ity, separate from but not incompatible with Freud's. In 1950, Erikson published Childhood and Society, a book that at first glance appears to be a hodgepodge of un​related chapters. Erikson himself originally had some difficulty finding a common theme underlying such topics as childhood in two Native American tribes, the growth of the ego, the eight stages of human development, and Hitler's childhood. Eventually, however, he recognized that the influence of psychological, cultural, and historical factors on identity was the underlying element that held the various chap​ters together. Childhood and Society, which became a classic and gave Erikson an in​ternational reputation as an imaginative thinker, remains the finest introduction to his post-Freudian personality theory.

In 1949, the University of California officials demanded that faculty members sign an oath pledging loyalty to the United States. Such a demand was not uncom​mon during those days when Senator Joseph McCarthy convinced many Americans that Communists and Communist sympathizers were poised to overthrow the U.S. government. Erikson was not a Communist, but as a matter of principle he refused to sign the oath. Although the Committee on Privilege and Tenure recommended that he retain his position, Erikson left California and returned to Massachusetts, where he worked as a therapist at Austen Riggs, a treatment center for psychoanalytic train​ing and research located in Stockbridge. In 1960, he returned to Harvard and, for the next 10 years, held the position of professor of human development. After retire​ment, Erikson continued an active career—writing, lecturing, and seeing a few pa​tients. During the early years of his retirement, he lived in Marin County, California; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Cape Cod. Through all these changes, Erikson con​tinued to seek his father's name. He died May 12, 1994, at the age of 91.

Who was Erik Erikson? Although he himself may not have been able to answer this question, other people can learn about the person known as Erik Erikson through his brilliantly constructed books, lectures, and essays.

Erikson's best-known works include Childhood and Society (1950, 1963, 1985); Young Man Luther (1958); Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968); Gandhi's Truth (1969), a book that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Di​mensions of a New Identity (1974); Life History and the Historical Moment (1975); Identity and the Life Cycle (1980); and The Life Cycle Completed (1982). Stephen Schlein compiled many of his papers in A Way of Looking at Things (Erikson, 1987).

The Ego in Post-Freudian Theory

In Chapter 2, we pointed out that Freud used the analogy of a rider on horseback to describe the relationship between the ego and the id. The rider (ego) is ultimately at the mercy of the stronger horse (id). The ego has no strength of its own but must bor​row its energy from the id. Moreover, the ego is constantly attempting to balance blind demands of the superego against the relentless forces of the id and the realis​tic opportunities of the external world. Freud believed that, for psychologically healthy people, the ego is sufficiently developed to rein in the id, even though its con​trol is still tenuous and id impulses might erupt and overwhelm the ego at any time.

In contrast, Erikson held that our ego is a positive force that creates a self-identity, a sense of "I." As the center of our personality, our ego helps us adapt to the various conflicts and crises of life and keeps us from losing our individuality to the leveling forces of society. During childhood, the ego is weak, pliable, and fragile; but by adolescence it should begin to take form and gain strength. Throughout our life, it unifies personality and guards against indivisibility. Erikson saw the ego as a par​tially unconscious organizing agency that synthesizes our present experiences with past self-identities and also with anticipated images of self. He defined the ego as a person's ability to unify experiences and actions in an adaptive manner (Erikson, 1963).

Erikson (1968) identified three interrelated aspects of ego: the body ego, the ego ideal, and ego identity. The body ego refers to experiences with our body; a way of seeing our physical self as different for other people. We may be satisfied or dis​satisfied with the way our body looks and functions, but we recognize that it is the

only body we will ever have. The ego ideal represents the image we have of ourselves in comparison with an established ideal; it is responsible for our being satisfied or dissatisfied not only with our physical self but with our entire personal identity. Ego identity is the image we have of ourselves in the variety of social roles we play. Al​though adolescence is ordinarily the time when these three components are chang​ing most rapidly, alterations in body ego, ego ideal, and ego identity can and do take place at any stage of life.

Society's Influence

Although inborn capacities are important in personality development, the ego emerges from and is largely shaped by society. Erikson's emphasis on social and his​torical factors was in contrast with Freud's mostly biological viewpoint. To Erikson, the ego exists as potential at birth, but it must emerge from within a cultural envi​ronment. Different societies, with their variations in child-rearing practices, tend to shape personalities that fit the needs and values of their culture. For example, Erik​son (1963) found that prolonged and permissive nursing of infants of the Sioux na​tion (sometimes for as long as 4 or 5 years) resulted in what Freud would call "oral" personalities: that is, people who gain great pleasure through functions of the mouth. The Sioux place great value on generosity, and Erikson believed that the reassurance resulting from unlimited breast-feeding lays the foundation for the virtue of gen​erosity. However, Sioux parents quickly suppress biting, a practice that may con​tribute to the child's fortitude and ferocity. On the other hand, people of the Yurok nation set strict regulations concerning elimination of urine and feces, practices that tend to develop "anality," or compulsive neatness, stubbornness, and miserliness. In European American societies, orality and anality are often considered undesirable traits or neurotic symptoms. Erikson (1963), however, argued that orality among the Sioux hunters and anality among the Yurok fishermen are adaptive characteristics that help both the individual and the culture. The fact that European American cul​ture views orality and anality as deviant traits merely displays its own ethnocentric view of other societies. Erikson (1968, 1974) argued that historically all tribes or na​tions, including the United States, have developed what he called a pseudospecies*" that is, an illusion perpetrated and perpetuated by a particular society that it is some​how chosen to be the human species. In past centuries, this belief has aided the sur​vival of the tribe, but with modern means of world annihilation, such a prejudiced perception (as demonstrated by Nazi Germany) threatens the survival of every nation.

One of Erikson's principal contributions to personality theory was his exten​sion of the Freudian early stages of development to include school age, youth, adult​hood, and old age. Before looking more closely at Erikson's theory of ego develop​ment, we discuss his view of how personality develops from one stage to the next.

Epigenetic Princip(e

Erikson believed that the ego develops throughout the various stages of life accord​ing to an epigenetic principle, a term borrowed from embryology. Epigenetic de​velopment implies a step-by-step growth of fetal organs. The embryo does not begin as a completely formed little person, waiting to merely expand its structure and

Children crawl before they walk, walk before they run, and run before they jump.

form. Rather, it develops, or should develop, according to a predetermined rate and in a fixed sequence. If the eyes, liver, or other organs do not develop during that crit​ical period for their development, then they will never attain proper maturity.

In similar fashion, the ego follows the path of epigenetic development, with each stage developing at its proper time. One stage emerges from and is built upon a previous stage, but it does not replace that earlier stage. This epigenetic develop​ment is analogous to the physical development of children, who crawl before they walk, walk before they run, and run before they jump. When children are still crawl​ing, they are developing the potential to walk, run, and jump; and after they are ma​ture enough to jump, they still retain their ability to run, walk, and crawl. Erikson (1968) described the epigenetic principle by saying that "anything that grows has a ground plan, and that out of this ground plan the parts arise, each part having its time of special ascendancy, until all parts have arisen to form a functioning whole" (p. 92). More succinctly, "Epigenesis means that one characteristic develops on top of another in space and time" (Evans, 1967, pp. 21-22).

The epigenetic principle is illustrated in Figure 9.1, which depicts the first three Eriksonian stages. The sequence of stages (1, 2, 3) and the development of their component parts (A, B, C) are shown in the heavily lined boxes along the diagonal. Figure 9.1 shows that each part exists before its critical time (at least as biological potential), emerges at its proper time, and finally, continues to develop during sub​sequent stages. For example, component part B of Stage 2 (early childhood) exists during Stage 1 (infancy) as shown in Box 1B. Part B reaches its full ascendance dur​ing Stage 2 (Box 2B), but continues into Stage 3 (Box 3B). Similarly, all components

Parts

Stage A B C

3A	3B	3c
2,,„	2B	2c
1,4,	1B	ic

FIGURE 9.1 Three Eriksonian Stages, Depicting the Epigenetic Principle.

Reprinted from The Life Cede Completed: A Review by Erik H. Erikson, by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright ,C) 1982 by Rikan Enterprises, Ltd.

of Stage 3 exist during Stages 1 and 2, reach full development during Stage 3, and continue throughout all later stages (Erikson, 1982).

Stages of Psychosocial Develament

Comprehension of Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development requires an understanding of several basic points. First, growth takes place according to the epi​genetic principle. That is, one component part arises out of another and has its own time of ascendancy, but it does not entirely replace earlier components.

Second, in every stage of life there is an interaction of opposites—that is, a con​flict between a syntonic (harmonious) element and a dystonic (disruptive) element. For example, during infancy basic trust (a syntonic tendency) is opposed to basic mistrust (a dystonic tendency). Both trust and mistrust, however, are necessary for proper adaptation. An infant who learns only to trust becomes gullible and is ill pre​pared for the realities encountered in later development, whereas an infant who learns only to mistrust becomes overly suspicious and cynical. Similarly, during each of the other seven stages, people must have both harmonious (syntonic) and disrup​tive (dystonic) experiences.

Third, at each stage, the conflict between the dystonic and syntonic elements produces an ego quality or ego strength, which Erikson referred to as a basic strength. For instance, from the antithesis between trust and mistrust emerges hope, an ego quality that allows an infant to move into the next stage. Likewise, each of the other stages is marked by a basic ego strength that emerges from the clash be​tween the harmonious and the disruptive elements of that stage.

Fourth, too little basic strength at any one stage results in a core pathology for that stage. For example, a child who does not acquire sufficient hope during infancy

will develop the antithesis or opposite of hope, namely, withdrawal. Again, each stage has a potential core pathology.

Fifth, although Erikson referred to his eight stages as psychosocial stages, he never lost sight of the biological aspect of human development.

Sixth, events in earlier stages do not cause later personality development. Ego identity is shaped by a multiplicity of conflicts and events—past, present, and antic​ipated.

Seventh, during each stage, but especially from adolescence forward, person​ality development is characterized by an identity crisis, which Erikson (1968) called "a turning point, a crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened poten​tial" (p. 96). Thus, during each crisis, a person is especially susceptible to major modifications in identity, either positive or negative. Contrary to popular usage, an identity crisis is not a catastrophic event but rather an opportunity for either adaptive or maladaptive adjustment.

Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development are shown in Figure 9.2. The boldfaced capitalized words are the ego qualities or basic strengths that emerge from the conflicts or psychosocial crises that typify each period. The "vs." separat​ing syntonic and dystonic elements signifies not only an antithetical relationship but also a complementary one. Only the boxes along the diagonal are filled in; that is, Figure 9.2 highlights only the basic strengths and psychosocial crises that are most characteristic of each stage of development. However, the epigenetic principle sug​gests that all the other boxes would be filled (as in Figure 9.1), though with other items less characteristic of their stage of psychosocial development. Each item in the ensemble is vital to personality development, and each is related to all the others.

CI Infancy

The first psychosocial stage is infancy, a period encompassing approximately the first year of life and paralleling Freud's oral phase of development. However, Erik-son's model adopts a broader focus than Freud's oral stage, which was concerned al​most exclusively with the mouth. To Erikson (1963, 1989), infancy is a time of in​corporation, with infants "taking in" not only through their mouth but through their various sense organs as well. Through their eyes, for example, infants take in visual stimuli. As they take in food and sensory information, infants learn to either trust or mistrust the outside world, a situation that gives them realistic hope. Infancy, then, is marked by the oral-sensory psychosexual mode, the psychosocial crisis of basic trust versus basic mistrust, and the basic strength of hope.

Oral-Sensory Mode

Erikson's expanded view of infancy is expressed in the term oral-sensory, a phrase that includes infants' principal psychosexual mode of adapting. The oral-sensory stage is characterized by two modes of incorporation—receiving and accepting what is given. Infants can receive even in the absence of other people; that is, they can take in air through the lungs and can receive sensory data without having to manipulate others. The second mode of incorporation, however, implies a social context. Infants not only must get, but they also must get someone else to give. This early training in interpersonal relations helps them learn to eventually become givers. In getting other

Parts

A B C D E F Ft

							WISDOM Integrity vs. despair, disgust
						CARE Generativity vs. stagnation
					LOVE Intimacy vs. isolation
				FIDELITY Identity vs. identity confusion
			COMPETENCE Industry vs. inferiority
		PURPOSE Initiative vs. guilt
	WILL Autonomy vs. shame, doubt
HOPE Basic trust vs. basic mistrust

FIGURE 9.2 Erikson's Eight Stages of Development with Their Appropriate Basic Strengths and Psychosocial Crises.

Reprinted from The Life Cycle Completed: A Review by Erik H. Erikson, by permission of W W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1982 by Rikan Enterprises, Ltd.

people to give, they learn to trust or mistrust other people, thus setting up the basic psychosocial crisis of infancy, namely, basic trust versus basic mistrust.

Basic Trust Versus Basic Mistrust

Infants' most significant interpersonal relations are with their primary caregiver, or​dinarily their mother. If they realize that their mother will provide food regularly, then they begin to learn basic trust; if they consistently hear the pleasant, rhythmic voice of their mother, then they develop more basic trust; if they can rely on an ex​citing visual environment, then they solidify basic trust even more. In other words, if their pattern of accepting things corresponds with culture's way of giving things, then infants learn basic trust. In contrast, they learn basic mistrust if they find no cor​respondence between their oral-sensory needs and their environment.

Basic trust is ordinarily syntonic, and basic mistrust, dystonic. Nevertheless, infants must develop both attitudes. Too much trust makes them gullible and

vulnerable to the vagaries of the world, whereas too little trust leads to frustration, anger, hostility, cynicism, or depression.

Both trust and mistrust are inevitable experiences of infants. All babies who have survived have been fed and otherwise cared for and therefore have some reason to trust. In addition, all have been frustrated by pain, hunger, or discomfort, and thus have a reason to mistrust. Erikson believed that some ratio of trust and mistrust is critical to people's ability to adapt. He told Richard Evans (1967) that "when we enter a situation, we must be able to differentiate how much we can trust and how much we must mistrust, and I use mistrust in the sense of a readiness for danger and an anticipation of discomfort" (p. 15).

The inevitable clash between basic trust and basic mistrust results in people's first psychosocial crisis. If people successfully solve this crisis, they acquire their first basic strength—hope.

Hope: The Basic Strength of Infancy

Hope emerges from the conflict between basic trust and basic mistrust. Without the antithetical relationship between trust and mistrust, people cannot develop hope. In​fants must experience hunger, pain, and discomfort as well as the alleviation of these unpleasant conditions. By having both painful and pleasurable experiences, infants learn to expect that future distresses will meet with satisfactory outcomes.

If infants do not develop sufficient hope during infancy, they will demonstrate the antithesis or the opposite of hope withdrawal, the core pathology of infancy. With little to hope for, they will retreat from the outside world and begin the journey toward serious psychological disturbance.

any Childhood

The second psychosocial stage is early childhood, a period paralleling Freud's anal stage and encompassing approximately the 2nd and 3rd years of life. Again, some differences exist between the views of Freud and Erikson. In Chapter 2, we explained that Freud regarded the anus as the primary erogenous zone during this period and that during the early sadistic-anal phase, children receive pleasure in destroying or losing objects, while later they take satisfaction in defecating.

Once again, Erikson took a broader view. To him, young children receive pleasure not only from mastering the sphincter muscle but also from mastering other body functions such as urinating, walking, throwing, holding, and so on. In addition, children develop a sense of control over their interpersonal environment, as well as a measure of self-control. However, early childhood is also a time of experiencing doubt and shame as children learn that many of their attempts at autonomy are un​successful.

Anal-Urethral-Muscular Mode

During the 2nd year of life, children's primary psychosexual adjustment is the anal​urethral-muscular mode. At this time, children learn to control their body, espe​cially in relation to cleanliness and mobility. Early childhood is more than a time of toilet training; it is also a time of learning to walk, run, hug parents, and hold on to toys and other objects. With each of these activities, young children are likely to display

some stubborn tendencies. They may retain their feces or eliminate them at will, snuggle up to their mother or suddenly push her away, delight in hoarding objects or ruthlessly discard them.

Early childhood is a time of contradiction, a time of stubborn rebellion and meek compliance, a time of impulsive self-expression and compulsive deviance, a time of loving cooperation and hateful resistance. This obstinate insistence on con​flicting impulses triggers the major psychosocial crisis of childhood—autonomy versus shame and doubt (Erikson, 1968).

Autonomy Versus Shame and Doubt

If early childhood is a time for self-expression and autonomy, then it is also a time for shame and doubt. As children stubbornly express their anal-urethral-muscular mode, they are likely to find a culture that attempts to inhibit some of their self-expression. Parents may shame their children for soiling their pants or for making a mess with their food. They may also instill doubt by questioning their children's abil​ity to meet their standards. The conflict between autonomy and shame and doubt be​comes the major psychosocial crisis of early childhood.

Ideally, children should develop a proper ratio between autonomy and shame and doubt, and the ratio should be in favor of autonomy, the syntonic quality of early childhood. Children who develop too little autonomy will have difficulties in subse​quent stages, lacking the basic strengths of later stages.

According to Erikson's epigenetic diagrams (see Figures 9.1 and 9.2), auton​omy grows out of basic trust; and if basic trust has been established in infancy, then children learn to have faith in themselves, and their world remains intact while they experience a mild psychosocial crisis. Conversely, if children do not develop basic trust during infancy, then their attempts to gain control of their anal, urethral, and muscular organs during early childhood will be met with a strong sense of shame and doubt, setting up a serious psychosocial crisis. Shame is a feeling of self-consciousness, of being looked at and exposed. Doubt, on the other hand, is the feel​ing of not being certain, the feeling that something remains hidden and cannot be seen. Both shame and doubt are dystonic qualities, and both grow out of the basic mistrust that was established in infancy.

Will: The Basic Strength of Early Childhood

The basic strength of will or willfulness evolves from the resolution of the crisis of autonomy versus shame and doubt. This step is the beginning of free will and willpower—but only a beginning. Mature willpower and a significant measure of free will are reserved for later stages of development, but they originate in the rudi​mentary will that emerges during early childhood. Anyone who has spent much time around 2-year-olds knows how willful they can be. Toilet training often epitomizes the conflict of wills between adult and child, but willful expression is not limited to this area. The basic conflict during early childhood is between the child's striving for autonomy and the parent's attempts to control the child through the use of shame and doubt.

Children develop will only when their environment allows them some self-expression in their control of sphincters and other muscles. When their experiences result in too much shame and doubt, children do not adequately develop this second

important basic strength. Inadequate will is expressed as compulsion, the core pathology of early childhood. Too little will and too much compulsivity carry for​ward into the play age as lack of purpose and into the school age as lack of confi​dence.

Play Age Erikson's third stage of development is the play age, a period covering the same time as Freud's phallic phase—roughly ages 3 to 5 years. Again, differences emerge be​tween the views of Freud and Erikson. Whereas Freud placed the Oedipus complex at the core of the phallic stage, Erikson believed that the Oedipus complex is but one of several important developments during the play age. Erikson (1968) contended that, in addition to identifying with their parents, preschool-age children are devel​oping locomotion, language skills, curiosity, imagination, and the ability to set goals.

Genital-Locomotor Mode

The primary psychosexual mode during the play age is genital-locomotor. Erikson (1982) saw the Oedipal situation as a prototype "of the lifelong power of human playfulness" (p. 77). In other words, the Oedipus complex is a drama played out in the child's imagination and includes the budding understanding of such basic con​cepts as reproduction, growth, future, and death. The Oedipus and castration com​plexes, therefore, are not always to be taken literally. A child may play at being a mother, a father, a wife, or a husband; but such play is an expression not only of the genital mode but also of the child's rapidly developing locomotor abilities. A little girl may envy boys, not because boys possess a penis, but rather because society grants more prerogatives to children with a penis. A little boy may have anxiety about losing something, but this anxiety refers not only to the penis but also to other body parts. The Oedipus complex, then, is both more than and less than what Freud believed, and infantile sexuality is "a mere promise of things to come" (Erikson, 1963, p. 86). Unless sexual interest is provoked by cultural sex play or by adult sex​ual abuse, the Oedipus complex produces no harmful effects on later personality de​velopment.

The interest that play-age children have in genital activity is accompanied by their increasing facility at locomotion. They can now move with ease, running, jump​ing, and climbing with no conscious effort; and their play shows both initiative and imagination. Their rudimentary will, developed during the preceding stage, is now evolving into activity with a purpose. Children's cognitive abilities enable them to manufacture elaborate fantasies that include Oedipal fantasies but also include imag​ining what it is like to be grown up, to be omnipotent, or to be a ferocious animal. These fantasies, however, also produce guilt and thus contribute to the psychosocial crisis of the play age, namely, initiative versus guilt.

Initiative Versus Guilt

As children begin to move around more easily and vigorously and as their genital in‑ terest awakens, they adopt an intrusive head-on mode of approaching the world. Al‑ though they begin to adopt initiative in their selection and pursuit of goals, many

goals, such as marrying their mother or father or leaving home, must be either re​pressed or delayed. The consequence of these taboo and inhibited goals is guilt. The conflict between initiative and guilt becomes the dominant psychosocial crisis of the play age.

Again, the ratio between these two should favor the syntonic quality—initia​tive. Unbridled initiative, however, may lead to chaos and a lack of moral principles. On the other hand, if guilt is the dominant element, children may become compul​sively moralistic or overly inhibited. Inhibition, which is the antipathy of purpose, constitutes the core pathology of the play age.

Purpose: The Basic Strength of the Play Age

The conflict of initiative versus guilt produces the basic strength of purpose. Chil​dren now play with a purpose, competing at games in order to win or to be on top. Their genital interests have a direction, with mother or father being the object of their sexual desires. They set goals and pursue them with purpose. Play age is also the stage in which children are developing a conscience and beginning to attach la​bels such as right and wrong to their behavior. This youthful conscience becomes the "cornerstone of morality" (Erikson, 1968, p. 119).

chool Age

Erikson's concept of school age covers development from about age 6 to approxi​mately age 12 or 13 and matches the latency years of Freud's theory. At this age, the social world of children is expanding beyond family to include peers, teachers, and other adult models. For school-age children, their wish to know becomes strong and is tied to their basic striving for competence. In normal development, children strive industriously to read and write, to hunt and fish, or to learn the skills required by their culture. School age does not necessarily mean formalized schools. In contem​porary literate cultures, schools and professional teachers play a major part in chil​dren's education, whereas in preliterate societies, adults use less formalized but equally effective methods to instruct children in the ways of society.

Latency

Erikson agreed with Freud that school age is a period of psychosexual latency. Sex​ual latency is important because it allows children to divert their energies to learn​ing the technology of their culture and the strategies of their social interactions. As children work and play to acquire these essentials, they begin to form a picture of themselves as competent or incompetent. These self images are the origin of ego identity that feeling of "I" or "me-ness" that evolves more fully during adoles​cence.

Industry Versus Inferiority

Although school age is a period of little sexual development, it is a time of tremen‑ dous social growth. The psychosocial crisis of this stage is industry versus inferior‑ ity. Industry, a syntonic quality, means industriousness, a willingness to remain busy

with something and to finish a job. School-age children learn to work and play at ac​tivities directed toward acquiring job skills and toward learning the rules of cooper​ation.

As children learn to do things well, they develop a sense of industry, but if their work is insufficient to accomplish their goals, they acquire a sense of inferiority—the dystonic quality of the school age. Earlier inadequacies can also contribute to children's feelings of inferiority. For example, if children acquire too much guilt and too little purpose during the play age, they will likely feel inferior and incompetent during the school age. However, failure is not inevitable. Erikson was optimistic in suggesting that people can successfully handle the crisis of any given stage even though they were not completely successful in previous stages.

The ratio between industry and inferiority should, of course, favor industry; but inferiority, like the other dystonic qualities, should not be avoided. As Alfred Adler (Chapter 3) pointed out, inferiority can serve as an impetus to do one's best. Conversely, an oversupply of inferiority can block productive activity and stunt one's feelings of competence.

Competence: The Basic Strength of the School Age

From the conflict of industry versus inferiority, school-age children develop the basic strength of competence: that is, the confidence to use one's physical and cog​nitive abilities to solve the problems that accompany school age. Competence lays the foundation for "co-operative participation in productive adult life" (Erikson, 1968, p. 126).

If the struggle between industry and inferiority favors either inferiority or an overabundance of industry, children are likely to give up and regress to an earlier stage of development. They may become preoccupied with infantile genital and Oedipal fantasies and spend most of their time in nonproductive play. This regres​sion is called inertia, the antithesis of competence and the core pathology of the school age.

Adolescence

Adolescence, the period from puberty to young adulthood, is one of the most cru​cial developmental stages because, by the end of this period, a person must gain a firm sense of ego identity. Although ego identity neither begins nor ends during ado​lescence, the crisis between identity and identity confusion reaches its ascendance during this stage. From this crisis of identity versus identity confusion emerges fidelity, the basic strength of adolescence.

Erikson (1982) saw adolescence as a period of social latency, just as he saw school age as a time of sexual latency. Although adolescents are developing sexually and cognitively, in most Western societies they are allowed to postpone lasting com​mitment to an occupation, a sex partner, or an adaptive philosophy of life. They are permitted to experiment in a variety of ways and to try out new roles and beliefs while seeking to establish a sense of ego identity. Adolescence, then, is an adaptive phase of personality development, a period of trial and error.

Puberty

Puberty, defined as genital maturation, plays a relatively minor role in Erikson's con​cept of adolescence. For most young people, genital maturation presents no major sexual crisis. Nevertheless, puberty is important psychologically because it triggers expectations of adult roles yet ahead—roles that are essentially social and can be filled only through a struggle to attain ego identity.

Identity Versus Identity Confusion

The search for ego identity reaches a climax during adolescence as young people strive to find out who they are and who they are not. With the advent of puberty, ado​lescents look for new roles to help them discover their sexual, ideological, and oc​cupational identities. In this search, young people draw from a variety of earlier self-images that have been accepted or rejected. Thus, the seeds of identity begin to sprout during infancy and continue to grow through childhood, the play age, and the school age. Then during adolescence, identity strengthens into a crisis as young peo​ple learn to cope with the psychosocial conflict of identity versus identity confusion.

A crisis should not suggest a threat or catastrophe but rather "a turning point, a crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential" (Erikson, 1968, p. 96). An identity crisis may last for many years and can result in either greater or lesser ego strength.

According to Erikson (1982), identity emerges from two sources: ( I ) adoles​cents' affirmation or repudiation of childhood identifications, and (2) their historical and social contexts, which encourage conformity to certain standards. Young people frequently reject the standards of their elders, preferring instead the values of a peer

The late adolescent's search for identity includes a discovery of sexual identity.

group or gang. In any event, the society in which they live plays a substantial role in shaping their identity.

Identity is defined both positively and negatively, as adolescents are deciding what they want to become and what they believe while also discovering what they do not wish to be and what they do not believe. Often they must either repudiate the val​ues of parents or reject those of the peer group, a dilemma that may intensify their identity confusion.

Identity confusion is a syndrome of problems that includes a divided self-image, an inability to establish intimacy, a sense of time urgency, a lack of concen​tration on required tasks, and a rejection of family or community standards. As with the other dystonic tendencies, some amount of identity confusion is both normal and necessary. Young people must experience some doubt and confusion about who they are before they can evolve a stable identity. They may leave home (as Erikson did) to wander alone in search of self; experiment with drugs and sex; identify with a street gang; join a religious order; or rail against the existing society, with no alter​native answers. Or they may simply and quietly consider where they fit into the world and what values they hold dear.

Once again, Erikson's theory is consistent with his own life. At age 18 and feeling alienated from the standards of his bourgeois family, Erikson set about searching for a different style of life. Gifted at sketching and with more identity con​fusion than identity, he spent the next 7 years wandering through southern Europe in search of an identity as an artist. Erikson (1975) referred to this stage of his life as a time of discontent, rebellion, and identity confusion.

Although identity confusion is a necessary part of our search for identity, too much confusion can lead to pathological adjustment in the form of regression to ear​lier stages of development. We may postpone the responsibilities of adulthood and drift aimlessly from one job to another, from one sex partner to another, or from one ideology to another. Conversely, if we develop the proper ratio of identity to identity confusion, we will have (1) faith in some sort of ideological principle, (2) the abil​ity to freely decide how we should behave, (3) trust in our peers and adults who give us advice regarding goals and aspirations, and (4) confidence in our choice of an eventual occupation.

Fidelity: The asic Strength of Adolescence

The basic strength emerging from adolescent identity crises is fidelity, or faith in one's ideology. After establishing their internal standards of conduct, adolescents are no longer in need of parental guidance but have confidence in their own religious, political, and social ideologies.

The trust learned in infancy is basic for fidelity in adolescence. Young people must learn to trust others before they can have faith in their own view of the future. They must have developed hope during infancy, and they must follow hope with the other basic strengths—will, purpose, and competence. Each is a prerequisite for fi​delity, just as fidelity is essential for acquiring subsequent ego strengths.

The pathological counterpart of fidelity is role repudiation, the core pathol​ogy of adolescence that blocks one's ability to synthesize various self-images and values into a workable identity. Role repudiation can take the form of either diffi‑

dence or defiance (Erikson, 1982). Diffidence is an extreme lack of self-trust or self-confidence and is expressed as shyness or hesitancy to express oneself. In contrast, defiance is the act of rebelling against authority. Defiant adolescents stubbornly hold to socially unacceptable beliefs and practices simply because these beliefs and prac​tices are unacceptable. Some amount of role repudiation, Erikson believed, is neces​sary, not only because it allows adolescents to evolve their personal identity, but also because it injects some new ideas and new vitality into the social structure.

oung Adulthood

After achieving a sense of identity during adolescence, people must acquire the abil​ity to fuse that identity with the identity of another person while maintaining their sense of individuality. Young adulthood a time from about age 19 to 30—is cir​cumscribed not so much by time as by the acquisition of intimacy at the beginning of the stage and the development of generativity at the end. For some people, this stage is a relatively short time, lasting perhaps only a few years. For others, young adulthood may continue for several decades. Young adults should develop mature genitality, experience the conflict between intimacy and isolation, and acquire the basic strength of love.

Genitality

Much of the sexual activity during adolescence is an expression of one's search for identity and is basically self-serving. True genitality can develop only during young adulthood when it is distinguished by mutual trust and a stable sharing of sexual sat​isfactions with a loved person. It is the chief psychosexual accomplishment of young adulthood and exists only in an intimate relationship (Erikson, 1963).

Intimacy Versus Isolation

Young adulthood is marked by the psychosocial crisis of intimacy versus isolation. Intimacy is the ability to fuse one's identity with that of another person without fear of losing it. Because intimacy can be achieved only after people have formed a sta​ble ego, the infatuations often found in young adolescents are not true intimacy. Peo​ple who are unsure of their identity may either shy away from psychosocial intimacy or desperately seek intimacy through meaningless sexual encounters.

In contrast, mature intimacy means an ability and willingness to share a mu​tual trust. It involves sacrifice, compromise, and commitment within a relationship of two equals. It should be a requirement for marriage, but many marriages lack in​timacy because some young people marry as part of their search for the identity that they failed to establish during adolescence.

The psychosocial counterpart to intimacy is isolation, defined as "the inca​pacity to take chances with one's identity by sharing true intimacy" (Erikson, 1968, p. 137). Some people become financially or socially successful, yet retain a sense of isolation because they are unable to accept the adult responsibilities of productive work, procreation, and mature love.

Again, some degree of isolation is essential before one can acquire mature love. Too much togetherness can diminish a person's sense of ego identity, which

leads that person to a psychosocial regression and an inability to face the next de​velopmental stage. The greater danger, of course, is too much isolation, too little in​timacy, and a deficiency in the basic strength of love.

Love: The Basic Strength of Young Adulthood

Love, the basic strength of young adulthood, emerges from the crisis of intimacy ver​sus isolation. Erikson (1968, 1982) defined love as mature devotion that overcomes basic differences between men and women. Although love includes intimacy, it also contains some degree of isolation, because each partner is permitted to retain a sep​arate identity. Mature love means commitment, sexual passion, cooperation, compe​tition, and friendship. It is the basic strength of young adulthood, enabling a person to cope productively with the final two stages of development.

The antipathy of love is exclusivity, the core pathology of young adulthood. Some exclusivity, however, is necessary for intimacy; that is, a person must be able to exclude certain people, activities, and ideas in order to develop a strong sense of identity. Exclusivity becomes pathological when it blocks one's ability to cooperate, compete, or compromise all prerequisite ingredients for intimacy and love.

) Adulthood

The seventh stage of development is adulthood, that time when people begin to take their place in society and assume responsibility for whatever society produces. For most people, this is the longest stage of development, spanning the years from about age 31 to 60. Adulthood is characterized by the psychosexual mode of procreativity, the psychosocial crisis of generativity versus stagnation, and the basic strength of care.

Procreativity

Erikson's psychosexual theory assumes an instinctual drive to perpetuate the species. This drive is the counterpart of an adult animal's instinct toward procreation and is an extension of the genitality that marks young adulthood (Erikson, 1982). However, procreativity refers to more than genital contact with an intimate partner. It includes assuming responsibility for the care of offspring that result from that sexual contact. Ideally, procreation should follow from the mature intimacy and love established during the preceding stage. Obviously, people are physically capable of produc​ing offspring before they are psychologically ready to care for the welfare of these children.

Mature adulthood demands more than procreating offspring; it includes caring for one's children as well as other people's children. In addition, it encompasses working productively to transmit culture from one generation to the next.

Generativity Versus Stagnation

The syntonic quality of adulthood is generativity, defined as "the generation of new beings as well as new products and new ideas" (Erikson, 1982, p. 67). Generativity, which is concerned with establishing and guiding the next generation, includes the

procreation of children, the production of work, and the creation of new things and ideas that contribute to the building of a better world.

People have a need not only to learn but also to instruct. This need extends be​yond one's own children to an altruistic concern for other young people. Generativ​ity grows out of earlier syntonic qualities such as intimacy and identity. As noted ear​lier, intimacy calls for the ability to fuse one's ego to that of another person without fear of losing it. This unity of ego identities leads to a gradual expansion of interests. During adulthood, one-to-one intimacy is no longer enough. Other people, especially children, become part of one's concern. Instructing others in the ways of culture is a practice found in all societies. For the mature adult, this motivation is not merely an obligation or a selfish need but an evolutionary drive to make a contribution to suc​ceeding generations and to ensure the continuity of human society as well.

The antithesis of generativity is self-absorption and stagnation. The genera​tional cycle of productivity and creativity is crippled when people become too ab​sorbed in themselves, too self-indulgent. Such an attitude fosters a pervading sense of stagnation. Some elements of stagnation and self-absorption, however, are neces​sary. Creative people must, at times, remain in a dormant stage and be absorbed with themselves in order to eventually generate new growth. The interaction of genera​tivity and stagnation produces care, the basic strength of adulthood.

Care: The Basic Strength of Adulthood

Erikson (1982) defined care as "a widening commitment to take care of the persons, the products, and the ideas one has learned to care for" (p. 67). As the basic strength of adulthood, care arises from each earlier basic ego strength. One must have hope, will, purpose, competence, fidelity, and love in order to take care of that which one cares for. Care is not a duty or obligation but a natural desire emerging from the con​flict between generativity and stagnation or self-absorption.

The antipathy of care is rejectivity, the core pathology of adulthood. Rejectiv​ity is the unwillingness to take care of certain persons or groups (Erikson, 1982). Re​jectivity is manifested as self-centeredness, provincialism, or pseudospeciation: that is, the belief that other groups of people are inferior to one's own. It is responsible for much of human hatred, destruction, atrocities, and wars. As Erikson said, rejec​tivity "has far-reaching implications for the survival of the species as well as for every individual's psychosocial development" (p. 70).

ctld Age

The eighth and final stage of development is old age. Erikson was in his early 40s when he first conceptualized this stage and arbitrarily defined it as the period from about age 60 to the end of life. Old age need not mean that people are no longer gen​erative. Procreation, in the narrow sense of producing children, may be absent, yet old people can remain productive and creative in other ways. They can be caring grandparents to their own grandchildren as well as to other younger members of so​ciety. Old age can be a time of joy, playfulness, and wonder; but it is also a time of senility, depression, and despair. The psychosexual mode of old age is generalized sensuality; the psychosocial crisis is integrity versus despair, and the basic strength is wisdom.

Generalized Sensuality

The final psychosexual stage is generalized sen​mc 'ity. Erikson had little to say about this mode of psychosexual life, but one may infer that it means to take pleasure in a variety of different phys​ical sensations—sights, sounds, tastes, odors, em​braces, and perhaps geni​tal stimulation. General​ized sensuality may also include a greater apprecia​tion for the traditional lifestyle of the opposite sex. Men become more nurturant and more accep​tant of the pleasures of

nonsexual relationships, including those with their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Women become more interested and involved in politics, finance, and world affairs

(Erikson, Erikson, & Kivnick, 1986). A generalized sensual attitude, however, is de‑

pendent on one's ability to hold things together, that is, to maintain integrity in the

face of despair.

Integrity Versus Despair

A person's final identity crisis is integrity versus despair At the end of life, the dys​tonic quality of despair may prevail, but for people with a strong ego identity who have learned intimacy and who have taken care of both people and things, the syn​tonic quality of integrity will predominate. Integrity means a feeling of wholeness and coherence, an ability to hold together one's sense of "I-ness" despite diminish​ing physical and intellectual powers.

Beyond Biography Who was Erik Erikson? For information on Erikson's lifelong search for his own identity, please go to our website at www.nzhhe.com/feist7

Ego integrity is sometimes difficult to maintain when people see that they are losing familiar aspects of their existence: for example, spouse, friends, physical health, body strength, mental alertness, independence, and social usefulness. Under such pressure, people often feel a pervading sense of despair, which they may ex​press as disgust, depression, contempt for others, or any other attitude that reveals a nonacceptance of the finite boundaries of life.

Despair literally means to be without hope. A reexamination of Figure 9.2 re​veals that despair, the last dystonic quality of the life cycle, is in the opposite corner

from hope, a person's first basic strength. From infancy to old age, hope can exist. Once hope is lost, despair follows and life ceases to have meaning.

Wisdom: The Basic Strength of Old Age

Some amount of despair is natural and necessary for psychological maturity. The in​evitable struggle between integrity and despair produces wisdom, the basic strength of old age. Erikson (1982) defined wisdom as "informed and detached concern with life itself in the face of death itself" (p. 61). People with detached concern do not lack concern; rather, they exhibit an active but dispassionate interest. With mature wisdom, they maintain their integrity in spite of declining physical and mental abil​ities. Wisdom draws from and contributes to the traditional knowledge passed from generation to generation. In old age, people are concerned with ultimate issues, in​cluding nonexistence (Erikson, Erikson, & Kivnick, 1986).

The antithesis of wisdom and the core pathology of old age is disdain, which Erikson (1982, p. 61) defined as "a reaction to feeling (and seeing others) in an in​creasing state of being finished, confused, helpless." Disdain is a continuation of re​jectivity, the core pathology of adulthood.

As Erikson himself aged, he became less optimistic about old age, and he and his wife began to describe a ninth stage—a period of very old age when physical and mental infirmities rob people of their generative abilities and reduce them to waiting for death. Joan, especially, was interested in this ninth stage as she watched her hus​band's health rapidly deteriorate during the last few years of his life. Unfortunately, Joan herself died before she could complete this ninth stage.

Summary of the Life Cycle

Erikson's cycle of life is summarized in Table 9.1. Each of the eight stages is char​acterized by a psychosexual mode as well as a psychosocial crisis. The psychosocial crisis is stimulated by a conflict between the predominating syntonic element and its antithetical dystonic element. From this conflict emerges a basic strength, or ego quality. Each basic strength has an underlying antipathy that becomes the core pathology of that stage. Humans have an ever-increasing radius of significant rela​tions, beginning with the maternal person in infancy and ending with an identifica​tion with all humanity during old age.

Personality always develops during a particular historical period and within a given society. Nevertheless, Erikson believed that the eight developmental stages transcend chronology and geography and are appropriate to nearly all cultures, past and present.

Erikson's Methods of Investigation

Erikson insisted that personality is a product of history, culture, and biology; and his diverse methods of investigation reflect this belief. He employed anthropological, historical, sociological, and clinical methods to learn about children, adolescents, mature adults, and elderly people. He studied middle-class Americans, European children, people of the Sioux and Yurok nations of North America, and even sailors

TABLE 9.1 '";'3A15:'

Summary of Erikson's Eight Stages of the Life Cycle

	Psychosexual	Psychosocial	Basic	Core	Significant
Stage	Mode	Crisis	Strength	Pathology	Relations
8 Old age	Generalization of sensual modes	Integrity vs. despair	Wisdom	Disdain	All humanity
7 Adulthood	Procreativity	Generativity vs. stagnation	Care	Rejectivity	Divided labor and shared household
6 Young adulthood	Genitality	Intimacy vs. isolation	Love	Exclusivity	Sexual partners, friends
5 Adolescence	Puberty	Identity vs. identity confusion	Fidelity	Role repudiation	Peer groups
4 School age	Latency	Industry vs. inferiority	Competence	Inertia	Neighborhood, school
3 Play age	Infantile genital​locomotor	Initiative vs. guilt	Purpose	Inhibition	Family
2 Early childhood	Anal-urethral‑ muscular	Autonomy vs. shame, doubt	Will	Compulsion	Parents
1	Oral-respiratory:	Basic trust vs.	Hope	Withdrawal	The mothering
Infancy	sensory‑ kinesthetic	basic mistrust			one

From The Life Cycle Completed: A Review by Erik H. Erikson, Copyright 0 1982 by Rikan Enterprises, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

on a submarine. He wrote biographical portraits of Adolf Hitler, Maxim Gorky, Mar​tin Luther, and Mohandas K. Gandhi, among others. In this section, we present two approaches Erikson used to explain and describe human personality—anthropologi​cal studies and psychohistory.

Anthropological Studies

In 1937, Erikson made a field trip to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to investigate the causes of apathy among Sioux children. Erikson (1963) re​ported on early Sioux training in terms of his newly evolving theories of psychosex​ual and psychosocial development. He found that apathy was an expression of an ex​treme dependency the Sioux had developed as a result of their reliance on various federal government programs. At one time, they had been courageous buffalo hunters, but by 1937, the Sioux had lost their group identity as hunters and were try​ing halfheartedly to scrape out a living as farmers. Child-rearing practices, which in the past had trained young boys to be hunters and young girls to be helpers and moth​ers of future hunters, were no longer appropriate for an agrarian society. As a con‑

sequence, the Sioux children of 1937 had great difficulty achieving a sense of ego identity, especially after they reached adolescence.

Two years later, Erikson made a similar field trip to northern California to study people of the Yurok nation, who lived mostly on salmon fishing. Although the Sioux and Yurok had vastly divergent cultures, each tribe had a tradition of training its youth in the virtues of its society. Yurok people were trained to catch fish, and therefore they possessed no strong national feeling and had little taste for war. Ob​taining and retaining provisions and possessions were highly valued among people of the Yurok nation. Erikson (1963) was able to show that early childhood training was consistent with this strong cultural value and that history and society helped shape personality.

Psychohistory

The discipline called psychohistory is a controversial field that combines psycho​analytic concepts with historical methods. Freud (1910/1957) originated psychohis​tory with an investigation of Leonardo da Vinci and later collaborated with Ameri​can ambassador William Bullitt to write a book-length psychological study of American president Woodrow Wilson (Freud & Bullitt, 1967). Although Erikson (1975) deplored this latter work, he took up the methods of psychohistory and re​fined them, especially in his study of Martin Luther (Erikson, 1958, 1975) and Ma​hatma Gandhi (Erikson, 1969, 1975). Both Luther and Gandhi had an important im​pact on history because each was an exceptional person with the right personal conflict living during a historical period that needed to resolve collectively what could not be resolved individually (E. Hall, 1983).

Erikson (1974) defined psychohistory as "the study of individual and collec​tive life with the combined methods of psychoanalysis and history" (p. 13). He used psychohistory to demonstrate his fundamental beliefs that each person is a product of his or her historical time and that those historical times are influenced by excep​tional leaders experiencing a personal identity conflict.

As an author of psychohistory, Erikson believed that he should be emotionally involved in his subject. For example, he developed a strong emotional attachment to Gandhi, which he attributed to his own lifelong search for the father he had never seen (Erikson, 1975). In Gandhi's Truth, Erikson (1969) revealed strong positive feelings for Gandhi as he attempted to answer the question of how healthy individu​als such as Gandhi work through conflict and crisis when other people are debilitated by lesser strife. In searching for an answer, Erikson examined Gandhi's entire life cycle but concentrated on one particular crisis, which climaxed when a middle-aged Gandhi first used self-imposed fasting as a political weapon.

As a child, Gandhi was close to his mother but experienced conflict with his father. Rather than viewing this situation as an Oedipal conflict, Erikson saw it as Gandhi's opportunity to work out conflict with authority figures—an opportunity Gandhi was to have many times during his life.

Gandhi was born October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, India. As a young man, he studied law in London and was inconspicuous in manner and appearance. Then, dressed like a proper British subject, he returned to India to practice law. After 2 years of unsuccessful practice, he went to South Africa, which, like India, was a

British colony. He in​tended to remain for a year, but his first serious identity crisis kept him there for more than 20 years.

A week after a judge excluded him from a courtroom, Gandhi was thrown off a train when he refused to give up his seat to a "white" man. These two experiences with racial prejudice changed Gandhi's life. By the time he resolved this identity crisis, his ap​pearance had changed dramatically. No longer attired in silk hat and black coat, he dressed in the cotton loincloth and shawl that were to be​come familiar to millions of people throughout the

world. During those years in South Africa, he evolved the technique of passive re‑

sistance known as Satyagraha and used it to solve his conflicts with authorities.

Satyagraha is a Sanskirt term meaning a tenacious, stubborn method of gathering

the truth.

After returning to India, Gandhi experienced another identity crisis when, in 1918, at age 49, he became the central figure in a workers' strike against the mill owners at Ahmedabad. Erikson referred to the events surrounding the strike as "The Event" and devoted the core of Gandhi Truth to this crisis. Although this strike was only a minor event in the history of India and received only scant attention in Gandhi's autobiography, Erikson (1969) saw it as having a great impact on Gandhi's identity as a practitioner of militant nonviolence.

The mill workers had pledged to strike if their demands for a 35% pay increase were not met. But the owners, who had agreed among themselves to offer no more than a 20% increase, locked out the workers and tried to break their solidarity by of​fering the 20% increase to those who would come back to work. Gandhi, the work​ers' spokesperson, agonized over this impasse. Then, somewhat impetuously, he pledged to eat no more food until the workers' demands were met. This, the first of his 17 "fasts to the death," was not undertaken as a threat to the mill owners but to demonstrate to the workers that a pledge must be kept. In fact, Gandhi feared that the mill owners might surrender out of sympathy for him rather than from recogni​tion of the workers' desperate plight. Indeed, on the third day, the workers and own​ers reached a compromise that allowed both to save face the workers would work

one day for a 35% increase, one day for a 20% increase, and then for whatever amount an arbitrator decided. The next day Gandhi ended his hunger strike, but his passive resistance had helped shape his identity and had given him a new tool for peaceful political and social change.

Unlike neurotic individuals whose identity crises result in core pathologies, Gandhi had developed strength from this and other crises. Erikson (1969) described the difference between conflicts in great people, such as Gandhi, and psychologically disturbed people: "This, then, is the difference between a case history and a life-history: patients, great or small, are increasingly debilitated by their inner conflicts, but in historical actuality inner conflict only adds an indispensable momentum to all superhuman effort" (p. 363).

Related Research

One of Erikson's major contributions was to extend personality development into adulthood. By expanding Freud's notion of development all the way into old age, Erikson challenged the idea that psychological development stops with childhood. Erikson's most influential legacy has been his theory of development and, in partic​ular, the stages from adolescence into old age. He was one of the first theorists to emphasize the critical period of adolescence and the conflicts revolving around one's search for an identity. Adolescents and young adults often ask: Who am I? Where am I going? And what do I want to do with the rest of my life? How they answer these questions plays an important role in what kinds of relationships they develop, who they marry, and what career paths they follow.

In contrast to most other psychodynamic theorists, Erikson stimulated quite a bit of empirical research, much of it on adolescence, young adulthood, and adult​hood. Here we discuss recent research on development in middle adulthood, specif​ically the stage of generativity.

Generativity and Parenting

Erikson (1982) defined generativity as "the generation of new beings as well as prod​ucts and new ideas" (p. 67). Generativity is typically expressed not only in bringing up children and fostering growth in young people but also in teaching, mentoring, cre​ating, and storytelling activities that bring new knowledge into existence and pass on old knowledge to the next generation. Dan McAdams and his colleagues (McAdams, 1999; McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1992; Bauer & McAdams, 2004b) have been major figures in research on generativity and have developed the Loyola Generativity Scale (LGS) to measure it. The LGS includes items such as "I have important skills that I try to teach others" and "I do not volunteer to work for a charity." The scale measures several aspects of generativity, including concern for the next generation; creating and maintaining objects and things; and person narration: that is, the subjective story or theme that an adult creates about providing for the next generation.

Using the LGS scale, researchers have investigated the impact of parental gen​erativity on the development of children. Theoretically, parents who have a high sense of generativity should put a great deal of effort and care into raising children

and therefore produce offspring who are well-adjusted and happy. Bill Peterson tested this idea in a study of college students and their parents (Peterson, 2006). Peterson predicted that the children of generative parents would not only be happier but also possess a high level of future time perspective, which is a technical way to say the children of generative parents will look toward the future more and do so with an optimistic view of things to come. To test these predictions, parents completed the LGS and students completed a measure of well-being that included items about general happiness, sense of freedom, and confidence in one's self. Students also com​pleted a measure of future time perspective whereby they rated how much they typi​cally think about the next day, next month, the next year, and 10 years from now.

The results were supportive of the general notion that having a sense of generativ​ity is important to effective parenting. The children of highly generative parents had more confidence in themselves, had a stronger sense of freedom, and were just generally hap​pier with life. Additionally, the children of highly generative parents had a stronger fu​ture time orientation meaning they spent time thinking about their future and, based on the overall well-being measure, felt pretty good about it. When these findings are considered within Erikson's framework, they make perfect sense. The opposite of gen​erativity is self-absorption and stagnation. If parents are overly self-absorbed and self-indulgent, then they are spending less time being concerned about the well-being of their children. Conversely, if parents are highly generative, then they are concerned about the development of their children and will do everything within their power to provide a stimulating and supportive environment in which children will thrive.

Generativity Versus Stagnation

Like all stages, adulthood consists of two interacting conflicts, generativity and stag​nation. Erikson generally considered stagnation and generativity to be opposite ends of the same continuum. In other words, a person who is high on generativity tends to be low on stagnation and vice versa. But recently, researchers have begun to ques​tion how opposing these two aspects of adult development really are and have ex​plored stagnation and generativity as somewhat independent constructs (Van Hiel, Mervielde, & De Fruyt, 2006). One reason for this switch from Erikson's model is that it might be possible for people to be both generative and stagnant. Such a sit​uation could happen if a person really wants to be generative and understands the importance of being generative but, for whatever reason, cannot overcome his or her own self-involvement. He or she may realize that generativity is the next stage in development but just cannot get there.

One way to determine the independence of these two constructs is to measure both separately and then measure several outcomes. If they are opposite levels of the same continuum, then when generativity positively predicts an outcome such as mental health, stagnation should negatively predict mental health. But if they do not always match, then the two constructs might be separate concepts. Because stagna​tion had never been measured separate from generativity before, the researchers had to create a measure from scratch. Based on the description of stagnation provided by other scholars (e.g., Bradley & Marcia, 1998), Van Hiel and colleagues (2006) cre​ated a self-report measure consisting of items such as "I often keep a distance between

myself and my children" and "It is hard to say what my goals are." To measure gen​erativity, the researchers used the LGS previously described and used in most research on generativity. To see how these two constructs match up to important outcomes, the researchers selected a broad measure of mental health that included the assess​ment of symptoms related to various personality disorders such as the inability to regulate emotions and intimacy issues.

The results of this study supported the new proposition that stagnation and generativity should be considered independently. For example, stagnation and gen​erativity did not predict mental health outcomes in the same way. Those who were high on stagnation tended to be less able to regulate their emotions; yet, at the same time, generativity was not related to emotion regulation. If only generativity had been measured (and not stagnation separately), then these researchers would not have uncovered the important finding that stagnation is related to problems in emo​tional regulation. The researchers also found that there are individuals who are high on both generativity and stagnation and that such a personality profile is not healthy in terms of mental and emotional well-being. Compared to people who are high on generativity but low on stagnation, people who are high on both dimensions are less able to regulate their emotions and experience more intimacy difficulties. Both of these qualities are considered to be components of a maladaptive personality.

Conceptually, this research does not differ a great deal from Erikson's model (stagnation and generativity are still included). It does show, however, that for the practical purposes of research and in order to understand personality in adulthood more fully, stagnation and generativity can and sometimes do operate separately and independently in adult development.

Critique of Erikson

Erikson built his theory largely on ethical principles and not necessarily on scientific data. He came to psychology from art and acknowledged that he saw the world more through the eyes of an artist than through those of a scientist. He once wrote that he had nothing to offer except "a way of looking at things" (Erikson, 1963, p. 403). His books are admittedly subjective and personal, which undoubtedly adds to their ap​peal. Nevertheless, Erikson's theory must be judged by the standards of science, not ethics or art.

The first criterion of a useful theory is its ability to generate research, and by this standard, we rate Erikson's theory somewhat higher than average. For example, the topic of ego identity alone has generated several hundred studies, and other as​pects of Erikson's developmental stages, such as intimacy versus isolation (Gold & Rogers, 1995) and generativity (Arnett, 2000; Pratt, Norris, Arnold, & Filyer, 1999), as well as the entire life cycle (Whitbourne, Zuschlag, Elliot, & Waterman, 1992), have stimulated active empirical investigations.

Despite this active research, we rate Erikson's theory only average on the cri​terion of falsUiability. Many findings from this body of research can be explained by theories other than Erikson's developmental stages theory.

In its ability to organize knowledge, Erikson's theory is limited mostly to de​velopmental stages. It does not adequately address such issues as personal traits or

motivation, a limitation that subtracts from the theory's ability to shed meaning on much of what is currently known about human personality. The eight stages of de​velopment remain an eloquent statement of what the life cycle should be, and re​search findings in these areas usually can be fit into an Eriksonian framework. How​ever, the theory lacks sufficient scope to be rated high on this criterion.

As a guide to action, Erikson's theory provides many general guidelines, but offers little specific advice. Compared to other theories discussed in this book, it ranks near the top in suggesting approaches to dealing with middle-aged and older adults. Erikson's views on aging have been helpful to people in the field of gerontology, and his ideas on ego identity are nearly always cited in adolescent psychology textbooks. In addition, his concepts of intimacy versus isolation and generativity versus stagnation have much to offer to marriage counselors and others concerned with intimate relationships among young adults.

We rate Erikson's theory high on internal consistency, mostly because the terms used to label the different psychosocial crises, basic strengths, and core pathologies are very carefully chosen. English was not Erikson's first language, and his extensive use of a dictionary while writing increased the precision of his termi​nology. Yet concepts like hope, will, purpose, love, care, and so on are not opera​tionally defined. They have little scientific usefulness, although they rank high in both literary and emotional value. On the other hand, Erikson's epigenetic principle and the eloquence of his description of the eight stages of development mark his the​ory with conspicuous internal consistency.

On the criterion of simplicity, or parsimony, we give the theory a moderate rat​ing. The precision of its terms is a strength, but the descriptions of psychosexual stages and psychosocial crises, especially in the later stages, are not always clearly differentiated. In addition, Erikson used different terms and even different concepts to fill out the 64 boxes that are mostly vacant in Figure 9.2. Such inconsistency sub​tracts from the theory's simplicity.

*Concept of L=UamanAy

In contrast to Freud, who believed that anatomy was destiny, Erikson suggested that other factors might be responsible for differences between women and men. Citing some of his own research, Erikson (1977) suggested that, although girls and boys have different methods of play, these differences are at least partly a result of different socialization practices. Does this conclusion mean that Erikson agreed with Freud that anatomy is destiny? Erikson's answer was yes, anatomy is destiny, but he quickly qualified that dictum to read: "Anatomy, history, and personality are our combined destiny" (Erikson, 1968, p. 285). In other words, anatomy alone does not determine destiny, but it combines with past events, including social and var​ious personality dimensions such as temperament and intelligence, to determine who a person will become.

Key Terms and Concepts

· Erikson's stages of development rest on an epigenetic principle, meaning that each component proceeds in a step-by-step fashion with later growth building on earlier development.

· During every stage, people experience an interaction of opposing syntonic and dystonic attitudes, which leads to a conflict, or psychosocial crisis.

· Resolution of this crisis produces a basic strength and enables a person to move to the next stage.

· Biological components lay a ground plan for each individual, but a multiplicity of historical and cultural events also shapes ego identity.

· Each basic strength has an underlying antipathy that becomes the core pathology of that stage.

· The first stage of development is infancy, characterized by the oral-sensory mode, the psychosocial crisis of basic trust versus mistrust, the basic strength of hope, and the core pathology of withdrawal.

· During early childhood, children experience the anal, urethral, and muscular psychosexual mode; the psychosocial conflict of autonomy versus shame and doubt; the basic strength of will; and the core pathology of compulsion.

· During the play age, children experience genital-locomotor psychosexual development and undergo a psychosocial crisis of initiative versus guilt, with either the basic strength of purpose or the core pathology of inhibition.

· School-age children are in a period of sexual latency but face the psychosocial crisis of industry versus inferiority, which produces either the basic strength of competence or the core pathology of inertia.

· Adolescence, or puberty, is a crucial stage because a person's sense of identity should emerge from this period. However, identity confusion may dominate the psychosocial crisis, thereby postponing identity. Fidelity is the basic strength of adolescence; role repudiation is its core pathology.

· Young adulthood, the time from about age 18 to 30, is characterized by the psychosexual mode of genitality, the psychosocial crisis of intimacy versus isolation, the basic strength of love, and the core pathology of exclusivity.

· Adulthood is a time when people experience the psychosexual mode of procreativity, the psychosocial crisis of generativity versus stagnation, the basic strength of care, and the core pathology of rejectivity.

· Old age is marked by the psychosexual mode of generalized sensuality, the crisis of integrity versus despoil; and the basic strength of wisdom or the core pathology of disdain.

· Erikson used psychohistory (a combination of psychoanalysis and history) to study the identity crises of Martin Luther, Mahatma Gandhi, and others.

Chapter 8 and 9 Information from Presentations.

Henry Stack Sullivan was born in New York in 1892. He was socially immature and isolated as a child. Sullivan received his medical degree in 1917 and gained a position at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. working with Schizophrenic Patients and he won the reputation as a “clinical wizard”. Sullivan moved to New York in 1930 to open private practice, where he met Horney, Fromm, and others. He also helped to establish Washington School of Psychiatry. Sullivan died alone in Paris in 1949 at age 56.

Sullivan viewed personality as an energy system which can either exist as a tension or energy transformations. A tension is a potentiality for action that may or may not be experienced in awareness.

The first tension that Sullivan discussed was the idea of needs. These are tensions brought on by biological imbalance between a persona and the environment and once they are satisfied they temporarily loose their power, but are likely to reoccur. Anxiety is a tension that is disjunctive, diffuse and vague and calls forth non-consistent actions for its relief. Energy transformations are tensions that are transformed into overt or covert actions.

Erik Erikson Born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1902, the Son of Jewish mother and unknown father. As a child, he did not feel accepted by either Jewish or Gentile community which he was a part of. He left home at 18, wandering Europe for 7 years. In Vienna, he was introduced to psychoanalysis by Anna Freud, who became his analyst. He then graduated from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. He lacked an academic degree and accepted a research position at Harvard Medical School in 1933. He then published Childhood and Society in 1950. He also taught at Yale, Berkeley, and several other institutions. And then became a professor of Human Development at Harvard in 1960. Erik Erikson died in Cape Cod in 1994.

When energy transformations become organized into behavior patterns that characterize a person throughout a lifetime they are known as dynamisms which are similar to traits or habit patterns. The first dynamism is malevolence (a feeling of living among one’s enemies), the second is intimacy (the need for tenderness and involves a close personal relationship), the third is lust which is an isolating tendency and requires no other person for its satisfaction. The final dynamism is the self-system which is a consistent pattern of behaviors that protect people against anxiety and main their interpersonal security

Another aspect of Sullivan’s Interpersonal Theory is of personifications. This is the idea that people acquire certain images of themselves and others and may be accurate or distorted. The first is the “Bad-Mother, Good-Mother” concept. This is similar to Klein’s view of the good breast, bad breast. The next is the “Me” Personifications which include the ideas of the “bad me”, “good me” and “not-me”. The final personification is the eidetic. These are imaginary traits that people project onto others.

Accoring to Feist and Feist, Sullivan divided cognition into three levels of experience. The first is the prototaxic level which is the earliest experiences that are impossible to put into words or to communicate to others. The next level is the Parataxic Level which experiences that are prelogical and result when illusory correlation is assumed. The final level is the Syntaxic Level which states that experiences that are consensually validated and can be accurately communicated to others.

In his study of personality development, Sullivan proposed seven stages of development. The first is infancy which is from birth until two where the infant’s primary interpersonal relationship is with the mother. The second stage is childhood and is from ages 2-6 where the mother continues to be the primary interpersonal relationship.

The Juvenile Era is from ages 6 until 8 and ½. This is characterized by a need for peers and playmates where they learn to compete, compromise and to cooperate. The next stage is preadolescence which is from 8 and ½ until 13. This is characterized by intimacy with one person usually of the same sex.

The next stage is early adolescence which is from ages 13 to 15 according to Sullivan. This is when genital interest erupts and lustful relationships appear. Late Adolescence is the next stage and is generally from 15 until 17 or 18 or until they establish a lasting love relationship. Adulthood is after the successful completion of late adolescence and is when people can establish a love relationship with at least one significant other person.

Sullivan believed that all psychological disorders have an interpersonal origin and must be understood with reference to social environment. Deficiencies found in psychiatric patients are found in every person to a lesser degree and psychological difficulties are not unique, but come from same interpersonal difficulties we all face. Sullivan distinguished two board classes of schizophrenia: organic and situational.

Sullivan based his therapeutic procedures on an effort to improve a patient’s relationship with others. Therapist is a participant observer who establishes an interpersonal relationship with the patient and provides opportunity for syntaxic communication. Sullivanian therapists attempt to help patients develop foresight, discover difficulties in interpersonal relations, and restore their ability to participate in consensually validated experiences

Erikson described the idea of the ego in light of post-Freudian theory. He described the ego as a positive force that creates a self-identity or a sense of “I” and is the center of our personality. Erikson identified three interrelated aspects of the Ego: The body ego, the ego ideal and the ego identity. Be sure and take some time to review these aspects. Erikson believed that the go exists as a “potential” at birth, but must emerge in light of a cultural environment. He believed the ego emerges from and is largely shaped by culture. Erikson also suggested the Epigenetic principle in light of development and suggested that the ego grow as our organs do, with certain changes arising at a particular time and that these developments are built upon previous structures.

Erikson suggested that there were eight stages of development and that these stages follow the epigenetic principle. He also believed that each stage was an interaction of opposites. Erikson proposed that during each stage, the conflict in that stage produces ego strength whereas too little strength at one stage results in core psychopathology at a later stage. He kept in mind the biological aspect of these stages, even though they are referred to as “psychosocial” stages. Erikson believed that events in earlier stages do not cause later personality development and he identified that from adolescence on, personality development involves an identity crisis.

Let’s take a look at Erikson’s Stages of Development. The first is Infancy. This is occurs during the first year of life and includes the oral-sensory mode which is characterized by two modes of incorporation which is receiving and accepting what is given. The goal of this stage is to determine Trust verses Basic Mistrust. Erikson suggested that if people successfully solve this crisis, they acquire their first basic strength: Hope. The second stage of Erikson’s psychosocial stages is Early Childhood. The conflict during this stage (from the ages of one to two) is autonomy verses shame and doubt. The idea behind this state is that children are learning to control their bodies, not only in the area of potty training, but in the area of mobility and cleanliness. I think that Feist and Feist describe this so well by stating “early childhood is a time of contradiction, a time of stubborn rebellion and meek compliance”. According to Erikson, the basic strength of early childhood is will. And if you have ever been a parent of a two year old (as I am right now), you can relate to the power of a child’s will.

The next stage is the Play Stage which generally occurs between the ages of 3 and 5. This is an age when, according to Erikson, children are developing locomotion, language skills, curiosity, imagination and the ability to set goals. The basic conflict of this stage is Initiative verses Guilt. The goal of this stage is to produce the strength of Purpose; the idea of playing with a purpose or playing a game to win or lose. The fourth of Erikson’s stages is the School Age which is from about age 6 until age 12 or 13. The conflict here is Industry verses Inferiority. This is the idea of staying busy or finishing a job with the feelings of being inferior or second-rate. With the completion of this stage comes the basic strength of the school age which is competence which in turn brings confidence.

The next stage is Adolescence. Erikson suggested that this stage is from puberty to young adulthood and is one of the most crucial developmental stages. The crisis during this stage is identity verses identity confusion. This is a time when each person works to figure out “who they are” and “who they are not”. The goal of this stage is the basic strength of Fidelity which is described as one’s faith in his or her ideology. Erikson’s sixth stage is Young Adulthood which normally occurs from 19 until 30. Erikson discussed the idea of genitality, which is a mutual trust and stable sharing of sexual satisfactions with a loved person. The conflict of this stage is Intimacy versus Isolation with Love being the basic strength of Young Adulthood.

The final two stages of Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages are Adulthood and Old Age. The first, Adulthood, focuses on Procreativity which suggests not only the introduction of offspring, but also taking care of them and productively working to transmit culture from one generation to the next. The crisis of this stage (lasting from about age 31 until 60) is “Generativity versus Stagnation” with the basic strength of Adulthood being: Care. Erikson defined this as a “widening commitment to take care of the persons, the products and the ideas one has learned to care for”. The final stage of Development according to Erikson is old age which is the period which is from 60 until the end of life. The crisis at this final stage is “Integrity versus Despair” with the basic strength being Wisdom.

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Assignment: MODULE 4:From Chapters 8 & 9

Topic: Examine Sullivan's Interpersonal Theory.  Pick either "Tensions" (Energy System) or "Dynamisms" (Behavior Patterns).  Compare and/or contrast the classes listed (Needs and Anxiety or Malevolence, Intimacy, Lust and Self-System) with the wisdom given in the Book of Proverbs.  Use Scripture from the Book of Proverbs in your thread.

REPLY TO = POST BY: at least 100 words

Sullivan had a brilliant mind and developed a theory based on behavior patterns and tendencies. His theory was based on dynamisms a term that deals with behavior patterns and traits (Feist & Feist, 2009). Sullivan split dynamisms into two different categories. The first was specific zones of the body and the second was tensions. Within these behaviors that deal with tension, Sullivan identified one pattern he called malevolence-which deals with evil and hatred (Feist & Feist, 2009). According to Sullivan he felt that children got feelings of malevolence fairly early in life. They would develop anger and negative feelings as a reaction of either a lack of motherly love and tenderness. Or possibly they were acting out due to being ignored, neglected or even due to being disciplined. The book of Proverbs in the Bible is known as the wisdom book of the Bible and it has plenty to say concerning a malevolent personality or negative feelings. Proverbs 22:15 says “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him” (NIV). This verse was particularly fitting since Sullivan felt that a parent trying to control their child through actions or verbally contributed to the child portraying malevolent behaviors. Two other verses that are very fitting are Proverbs 3:31-32 (Do not envy a violent man or choose any of his ways, for the lord detests a perverse man but takes the upright into his confidence” (NIV)

 

Intimacy is the next part of dynamism that Sullivan deals with. Basically he felt it was important for a person to have a close friendship with someone that they viewed as an equal. This special friendship would be very beneficial to both people because it would help alleviate loneliness and help decrease anxiety (Feist & Feist, 2009). Proverbs had several great verses that dealt with the benefits of friendship. Proverbs 17:17a “A friend loves at all times” (NIV). Proverbs 27:17 “As iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another” (NIV). God created us to be in relationship with other people. Sullivan understood the importance of friendship.

 

  The next thing that Sullivan addressed was lust. Lust according to Sullivan often leads to inappropriate activity which can lead to shame and lower the self esteem. (Feist & Feist, 2009). Proverbs speaks of marriage and the importance of remaining faithful to your spouse. In Proverbs 19:22a it says “what a man desires is unfailing love” (NIV) Lust is just a waste of time because everyone is really seeking to be loved and treated kindly.

 

 

 

The last thing that Sullivan discusses is something he called the Self System. The self system is a complex theory to understand. Sullivan considered the self system as a pattern behaviors that help protect a person from anxiety. (Feist & Feist, 2009) A person develops an image of their personality as their self system develops. The entire book of Proverbs provides wisdom and guidance on how to live a wise life. The Bible is a wealth of knowledge that can help people through any situation in life. It is just a matter of opening up the Bible and reading it, then applying it.

 

  

Word Count 532

 

Feist, J., & Feist, G. (2009). Theories of personality (7th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

   

Holy Bible, NIV (1984). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Corporation

 

 

REPLY TO = POST BY: at least 100 words……. by Kay And

Sullivan believed that energy is displayed by tension or energy transformations (Feist & Feist, 2009). The two tensions in Sullivan's theory are needs and anxiety. According to our textbook needs are normally productive actions and anxiety is a nonproductive behavior (Feist & Feist, 2009).

The first tension is the most basic which is tenderness. When we were conceived and grew in our mother's womb we developed a bond. Tenderness needs two people and normally involves touching, fondling or holding (Feist & Feist, 2009). Tenderness is considered to be just as important as food or even water because it is affects the wellbeing of a person (Feist & Feist, 2009). In Proverbs 4:3(NIV) is says “For I too was a son to my father, still tender, and cherished by my mother”. Tenderness is also like the gentleness which happens to be one of the fruits of the spirit. In addition Proverbs 28:14 (MSG) says “A tenderhearted person lives a blessed life; a hardhearted person lives a hard life”.  Even though people let us down God will never leave us and in Psalms 91 it says He will protect and hide us under his wings.   The next tensions is anxiety, Sullivan believed that tensions could prevent learning, memory and impair perception (Feist & Feist, 2009). There are three behaviors that anxiety can cause. If we are anxious we may never take the action to make a mistake and unable to learn from our mistakes. Also we can have a child like need for security or be unable to learn from our experiences (Feist & Feist, 2009). When we have anxiety we make no efforts. Proverbs 29:25 (MSG) says “The fear of human opinion disables trusting in God protects you from that”. Our anxiety can come from the classic what will people think, and therefore we isolate ourselves and are unable to trust God. In Proverbs 3:21-26 (MSG) “You'll take afternoon naps without a worry...No need to panic over alarms or surprises...Because God will be right there with you...” We have no reason to anxious over anything when God is there. God is our energy transformations and he gives us peace and freedom.   (word count 348) References Feist, J., & Feist, G. (2009). Theories of personality (7th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.   

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During late adolescence, young people feel both lust and intimacy toward one other person.

Early 13 to 15 Several chums

adolescence

Late 15 — Lover

adolescence

Intimacy and�lust toward�different�persons

Fusion of intimacy and lust

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Erikson

Related Research

Generativity and Parenting Generativity Versus Stagnation

Critique of Erikson

Concept of Humanity

Key Terms and Concepts

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3

Play age

2

Early childhood

1

Infancy

Stage

Old age

6

Adulthood

7

Young adulthood

6

Adolescence

5

School age

4

Play age

3

Early childhood

2

Infancy

1

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Erikson's stages of development extend into old age.

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According to Erikson, Mahatma Gandhi developed basic strengths from his several identity crises.

How does Erikson's theory conceptualize humanity in terms of the six dimen�sions we introduced in Chapter 1? First, is the life cycle determined by external forces or do people have some choice in molding their personalities and shaping their lives? Erikson was not as deterministic as Freud, but neither did he believe strongly in free choice. His position was somewhere in the middle. Although per�sonality is molded in part by culture and history, people retain some limited con�trol over their destiny. People can search for their own identities and are not com�pletely constrained by culture and history. Individuals, in fact, can change history and alter their environment. The two subjects of Erikson's most extensive psy�chohistories, Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi, each had a profound effect on world history and on his own immediate surroundings. Similarly, each of us has the power to determine his or her own life cycles, even though our global impact may be on a lesser scale.

On the dimension of pessimism versus optimism, Erikson tended to be some�what optimistic. Even though core pathologies may predominate early stages of de�velopment, humans are not inevitably doomed to continue a pathological existence in later stages. Although weaknesses in early life make it more difficult to acquire basic strengths later on, people remain capable of changing at any stage of life. Each psychosocial conflict consists of a syntonic and a dystonic quality. Each cri�sis can be resolved in favor of the syntonic, or harmonious element, regardless of past resolutions.

Erikson did not specifically address the issue of causality versus teleology, but his view of humanity suggests that people are influenced more by biological and so�cial forces than by their view of the future. People are a product of a particular his�torical moment and a specific social setting. Although we can set goals and actively strive to achieve these goals, we cannot completely escape the powerful causal forces of anatomy, history, and culture. For this reason, we rate Erikson high on causality.

On the fourth dimension, conscious versus unconscious determinants, Erikson's position is mixed. Prior to adolescence, personality is largely shaped by uncon�scious motivation. Psychosexual and psychosocial conflicts during the first four de�velopmental stages occur before children have firmly established their identity. We seldom are clearly aware of these crises and the ways in which they mold our per�sonalities. From adolescence forward, however, people ordinarily are aware of their actions and most of the reasons underlying those actions.

Erikson's theory, of course, is more social than biological, although it does not overlook anatomy and other physiological factors in personality development. Each psychosexual mode has a clear biological component. However, as people ad�vance through the eight stages, social influences become increasingly more power�ful. Also, the radius of social relations expands from the single maternal person to a global identification with all humanity.

The sixth dimension for a concept of humanity is uniqueness versus similari�ties. Erikson tended to place more emphasis on individual differences than on uni�versal characteristics. Although people in different cultures advance through the eight developmental stages in the same order, myriad differences are found in the pace of that journey. Each person resolves psychosocial crises in a unique manner, and each uses the basic strengths in a way that is peculiarly theirs.