Erik Erikson’s Eight Stages of Development

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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 occur .Only if we have learned from the previous crisis we are successful. You cannot avoid 1 stage and move to a next stage because of the developing process. The outcome of our lives depends on the way we chose to progress throughout each stage in life. Erikson had his own way in describing each stage in life that we all must go through. Erik Erikson’s eight Stages of man; politically 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. Because 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 commonly use it in conversation. The main i... ... middle of paper ... ...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). Works Cited Bee, H.L (1992). The Developing Child. New York, NY: Harper Collins College Publishers. McAdams, D.P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of general psychology, 5 (2), 100. McLeod, S.A. (2008) Developmental psychology. Retrieved http://www.simplypsychology.org Myers, D.G. (2010). Social Development . In D. Kasowitz ( Ed.) , Psychology (p. 200-201). New York : Worth Publishers

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