Dysfunctional Tyrone Family In A Long Day's Journey Into Night

Psychologist Erik Erikson has a theory that assumes that there are eight psychosocial stages of development throughout a person's lifetime. At each stage, a pivotal personal crisis (psycho) resulting in social amelioration (social) should occur for the person to have a healthy sense of self. Eugene O'Neill's in "A Long Day's Journey into Night" highlights the dysfunctional Tyrone family, all of which have a difficult time identifying their personal crises while navigating societal pressures. Therefore, according to Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, each member of the Tyrone family is tragically stuck in their own dilatory stages of social self-realization.

The author of "A Long Day's Journey into Night", Eugene O'Neill writes an autobiographical playwright about his dysfunctional family, in which he depicts himself as his younger brother, Edmund. Although Edmund has character

He has reached the eighth and final stage, Ego Integrity vs. Despair, but as he looks back on his life he realizes that he has an unsatisfied fulfillment in his life brought upon by a summation of developmental errors that occurred in previous stages. These developmental errors in the previous stages have led to James being in overall despair about his life, career and family. Throughout his life he has always been very frugal to save for the end of his life, Erikson believes at the end of the last stage the person will feel closure and accept death without fear, obviously James has not reached a point where he has contentment in his life. James acknowledges his shortcomings within his acting career and attributes that to his frugality, but he does not admit that any of the relationships that he has built with his family were negatively affected by his career and alcohol addiction. For these reason, until he can accept his role in the chaos that is the Tyrone family, he will always be in