Erik Erickson's Stages Of Development

In Erik Erikson’s theory he explains that in every stage, a positive or a negative attitude is developed within an individual. During our developing stages we are either successful or we fail. Each stage will come to us whether or not we’re ready for them or not. You can think of the stages as learning stages where crisis occurs. If we learn from our previous crisis we are successful. You cannot avoid one stage and move to the next stage because of the developing process. The outcome of our lives depends on the way we choose to progress throughout each stage in life. Erikson had his own way in describing each stage in life that we all must go through.

Erickson’s Psychological Stages of Development
Erik Erikson’s eight Stages of man, is also known as the eight stages of psychosocial development. He promotes social interactions as a motivation to personality development. Erickson studied stages from the beginning of the life cycle to the later stages of life. Erickson was trained under the famous Sigmund Freud. His belief was that it wasn’t only sex that motivated personality development. Social interaction and a growing sense of competence is the key to it all. Since his beliefs differed from the beliefs of Freud, Erikson quickly began to work on his own. Erickson has focused on many different eras of psychological development.
Ego identity is said to be one of the many things Erickson has focused on. He believed that through social interaction we gain mindful sense of ourselves, which can be commonly referred to as Ego identity. Although, Freud referred to the ego as the match over the necessities of the identity and superego, Erickson saw the ego as our way of our self-esteem. The way Erickson describes ego is the way we common...

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...us stages so now they should be met in this stage. During late adulthood we deal with integrity vs. despair. We’re forced to reflect back on our lives and whether or not we served a purpose in society. If we gain a sense of regret we become bitter because life didn’t go as planned. This stage of life should be thought of as a rollercoaster.
In conclusion, Erickson has taught us that we all at some point in life go through 8 different psychosocial stages of life. Each step has to be completed in order to have gained knowledge and to be able to be successful in the next stage of development. Researching this topic has taught me that we can’t skip over skills and expect to have success or live happily ever after. I now realize how important learning from my mistakes can be. Childhood becomes the remembered past and adulthood the anticipated future (McAdams, 2001).