Part 2

Erikson’s 8 Stages

Erik Erikson (1959) saw pyschosocial development as taking place in 8 stages, each of which is marked by a crisis brought on by conflict between the natural processes of maturation and the expectations of society - to some degree paralleling Clare W Graves’ sense of vMEMES emerging in response to Life Conditions (though Graves considered internal Life Conditions as well as external). The resolution of each stage strengthens the selfplex. (Somewhat confusingly Erikson used  the term ‘Ego’ both in the very specific Freudian sense and in the more general sense of a concept of self - for which Integrated SocioPsychology substitutes ‘selfplex’.). According to Erikson, problems resolved at an earlier stage can be at least partially undone by later experiences. Similarly failure to resolve a current crisis satisfactorily can impact on development at a later stage.

Erikson’s 8 stages are summarised very basically below:-

Some care needs to be taken in ascribing age-bands to each stage as Erikson himself varied them in different writings. (The Parenting stage is sometimes put as starting at 30 while the Maturity stage has appeared as starting at 60.)

STAGE 1: ORAL-SENSORY

The important event in this stage is feeding. According to Erikson, the infant will develop a sense of trust only if the parent or caregiver is responsive and consistent with the basic needs being meet. The need for care and food must be met with comforting regularity. The infant must first form a trusting relationship with the parent or caregiver, the child should develop the feeling that the world - especially the social world - is a safe place to be, that people are reliable and loving. Through the parents' responses, the child also learns to trust their own body and the biological urges that go with it. If the parents are unreliable and inadequate, if they reject the infant or harm it, then the infant will develop mistrust. They will be apprehensive and suspicious around people and possibly aggressive towards them. (‘Oral aggressive’ in Sigmund Freud’s terminology - see Psychosexual Fixations & Personality.)

However, it is important the infant retains some capacity for mistrust. Parents who are overly protective of the child or who are there the minute the child cries, may draw the child into gullibility or over-dependency on others. (‘Oral receptive’, according to Freud.)

The trust vs mistrust conflict of Stage 1 is very much reflected in the work of Mary Ainsworth on secure and insecure attachments - see the Strange Situation Study - which is to do with the health of the PURPLE vMEME. It implicitly lends support to John Bowlby’s (1958) concept of the internal working model.

The fact that the core driver in this stage is the need to feed represents both BEIGE’s survival mechanisms and the Freudian Id’s instinctual self-orientation. The fact that trust develops through the mother (or other caregiver) being consistent in providing food shows dominance in the child’s motivation moving from BEIGE to PURPLE. (However, evidence has emerged in recent years to indicate that PURPLE may first start to emerge while the child is still in the womb and work with BEIGE as pre-natal biological mechanisms prepare the child for belonging instinctively to its mother after birth - see Biological Impetus to Attachment.)

Freud, of course, named the first stage the ‘Oral Stage’ not only because the first major event in the child’s life is feeding but also because the child tends to explore the world through it’s mouth.

Elements for a positive outcome
The infant's need for care, familiarity, comfort and nourishment are met. Parental consistency and responsiveness is essential for the sense of trust to develop.
Elements for a negative outcome
Babies who are not securely attached to their mothers are less cooperative and more aggressive in their interactions with their mothers. As they grow older, they become less competent and less sympathetic with peers. They also explore their environment with less enthusiasm and less persistence.
Examples
Babies will begin to understand that objects and people exist even when they cannot see them. This is where trust becomes important in facilitating cognitive development.

STAGE 2: MUSCULAR-ANAL

According to Erikson, self-control and self-confidence begin to develop at this stage. Children can do more on their own. As Freud insisted, toilet training is the most important event at this (Anal) stage. However, Erikson moves beyond Freud by widening the issue to infants beginning to impose their will over their own bodies, rather than just toileting. Children also begin to feed and dress themselves. Erikson emphasises the infant beginning to master their external environment. This is how the toddler strives for autonomy and begins to achieve self-esteem, thus strengthening the emerging RED vMEME. Recognition of success - esteem - from others also meets PURPLE’s need for acceptance from ‘significant others’. (Success at this stage also fulfils the mission of the Freudian Ego to protect the self from the consequences of undesirable actions and failures.)

According to Erikson, it is essential for parents not to be overprotective at this stage. A parent's level of protectiveness will influence the child's ability to achieve autonomy. If a parent is not reinforcing - eg: laughs at the child’s efforts or is impatient with them - the child will feel shameful and will learn to doubt their own capabilities. "Erikson believes that children who experience too much doubt at this stage will lack confidence in their powers later in life" ( Anita Woolfolk, 1987).  Such doubt and shame could lead to the maladaptive tendency to be compulsive in achieving perfection. (A weak and unfulfilled RED could lay the ground for BLUE to be distorted and unhealthy in its future search for ‘the right way to live’.)

However, Erikson also believed a little shame and doubt was not only inevitable but also beneficial. Without it, the child is likely to develop impulsiveness which Erikson also considers a maladaptive tendency - a sort of shameless willfulness that leads someone, in later childhood and even adulthood, to jump into things without proper consideration of your abilities or the consequences. (While this might sound like the temperamental dimension of Psychoticism, Erikson does not specify any gender differences in this respect - which Hans J Eysenck & Sybil B G Eysenck (1976) certainly did!)

Elements for a positive outcome
The child must take more responsibility for their own feeding, toileting and dressing. Parents must be reassuring yet avoid overprotection.
Elements for a negative outcome
If parents do not maintain a reassuring, confident attitude and do not reinforce the child's efforts to master basic motor and cognitive skills, children may begin to feel shame; they may learn to doubt their abilities to manage the world on their own terms. Children who experience too much doubt at this stage will lack confidence in their own powers throughout life. Erikson (1959) talked about “...the sinister forces which are leashed or unleashed, especially in the guerilla warfare of unequal wills; for the child is often unequal to his own violent drives, and parent and child unequal to each other.”
Examples
In this stage children begin to assume important responsibilities for self-care like feeding, toileting, and dressing.

STAGE 3: GENITAL-LOCOMOTOR

The most important event at this stage is independence. With the RED vMEME increasing in strength, the child continues to be assertive and to take the initiative. Playing and hero worshipping are an important form of initiative for children. Fantasy, curiosity and imagination should be encouraged. When the child shows initiative, it is the attempt to make what they have imagined into reality. Children in this stage are eager for responsibility. Erikson (1959) wrote: “Being firmly convinced that he is a person, the child must now find out what kind of person he is going to be...he wants to be like his parents, who to him appear very powerful and beautiful, although quite unreasonably dangerous.”

It is essential for adults to confirm that the child's initiative is accepted no matter how small it may be - this shows that RED displaying itself will not undermine PURPLE’s need for acceptance and belonging - thus facilitating healthy psychological development. If the child is not given a chance to be responsible and do things on their own, a sense of worthlessness and even guilt may develop. The child will come to believe that what they want to do is always wrong - which will have a devastating effect on psychological development and will almost certainly distort moral development.

As far as the child has an Oedipal crisis, Erikson saw it as the reluctance the child may experience in relinquishing their closeness to the opposite-sex parent. Erikson believed parents should encourage independence from them - but this should not be done too harshly or the child may develop guilt over their feelings.

Too much initiative and too little guilt, however, can produce the maladaptive tendency of ruthlessness. Too much guilt may lead to someone becoming inhibited and preventing the RED vMEME from developing healthily; as a consequence, they become afraid to try things out. Men who became inhibited at this stage may experience impotency in adult life, according to Erikson, while inhibited women may be sexually frigid.
While PURPLE needs still to be nurtured at this stage, RED would normally dominate in the vMEME Stack. However, this stage normally will also see the first beginnings of BLUE starting to exert a moralistic, disciplining effect.

Elements for a positive outcome
In order for a positive outcome in this stage, the child must learn to accept, without guilt, that there are certain things not allowed. Children must be guilt free when using imagination. They must be reassured that it is okay to play certain adult roles.
Elements for a negative outcome
If children are not allowed to do things on their own, a sense of guilt may develop and they may come to believe that what they want to do is always wrong.
Examples
A four year old passing tools to a parent who is fixing a bicycle. Children at this stage will worship heroes. Pretend games are also common.

STAGE 4: LATENCY

"In this stage children are learning to see the relationship between perseverance and the pleasure of a job completed" (Woolfolk, 1987). Children must ‘tame the imagination’ and dedicate themselves to education and to learning the social skills their society requires of them. In other words, their BLUE is sufficiently emerged to both to respond to expectations from a wide range of external sources and to impose sufficient self-discipline to meet those expectations. The important event at this stage is attendance at school. As a student, the children have a need to be productive and do work on their own. They are both physically and mentally ready for it. Children must learn that there is pleasure not only in conceiving a plan but also in carrying it through. They must learn the feeling of success, whether it is in school or on the playground, academic or social - thus feeding RED’s need to boost self-esteem. If the child is allowed too little success, perhaps because of harsh teachers or rejecting peers, they will develop instead a sense of inferiority or incompetence. (An additional source of inferiority Erikson mentions is racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination; if a child believes that success is related to who you are rather than to how hard you try, then why try? RED’s need for self-esteem is undermined, inhibiting the sustained emergence of healthy BLUE.)

Interaction with peers at school also plays an imperative role of child development in this stage - the PURPLE vMEME having a role to play in creating new friendship bonds. The child for the first time has a wide variety of events to deal with, including academics, group activities, and friends. The child also learns to take more responsibility at home. Difficulty with any of these leads to a sense of inferiority.
Too much industry leads to the maladaptive tendency Erikson called ‘narrow virtuosity’. This is seen in children who aren't allowed to ‘be children’, the ones that parents or teachers push into one area of competence, without allowing the development of broader interests. These are the kids without a life: child actors, child athletes, child musicians...child prodigies of all sorts. We all admire their industry; but if we look a little closer, Erikson argues, it can be all that stands in the way of an empty life.

Much more common is the malignancy of inertia. This includes all who suffer from the ‘inferiority complexes’ Alfred Adler (1922) talked about. Those who suffer from inertia tend to experience failure once - or see others fail - and thus learn not to try, to avoid the stigma of failure again. Thus, the child either learns that industry pays off or it is better to accept being inferior and the limitations that imposes. (In Behaviourist terms, this is learned helplessness.)

Erikson’s notion that the development of the self (selfplex) during Stage 4 is increasingly influenced by friends and schoolmates gets support from the work of William Damon & Daniel Hart (1988) who found that children between 8-11 are much more likely to describe themselves in comparative, psychological terms to their peers - eg: “I’m kind” - than younger children (4-7) who tend to use more tangible concepts to define themselves - eg: “I’ve got dark hair”.

Elements for a positive outcome
It is essential for the child at this stage to discover pleasure in being productive and the need to succeed. The child's relationship with peers in school and the neighbourhood become increasingly important.
Elements for a negative outcome
Difficulty with the child's ability to move between the world at home and the world of peers can lead to feeling of inferiority.
Examples
In this stage children want to do productive work on their own. Students are able to water class plants, collect and distribute materials for teacher, and keep records of forms for teacher.

STAGE 5: ADOLESCENCE

It was adolescence that interested Erikson first and most; and the patterns he saw here were the starting points for his thinking about all the other stages.

At this stage, adolescents are in search of an identity that will lead them to adulthood. Adolescents make a strong effort to answer the question "Who am I?" Erikson notes the healthy resolution of earlier conflicts can now serve as a foundation for the search for an identity. If the child overcomes earlier conflicts, they are prepared to search for identity. Did they develop the basic sense of trust? Do they have a strong sense of industry to believe in themselves? Without these things, the adolescent is likely to experience role confusion, meaning an uncertainty about your place in society and the world. When an adolescent is confronted by role confusion, Erikson says Erikson strongly supported the notion that society should provide clear rites of passage - certain accomplishments and rituals that help to distinguish the adult from the child. In one way or another, the distinction between the powerless but irresponsible time of childhood and the powerful and responsible time of adulthood, needs to be made clear.

The sense of forward-looking into adulthood - as opposed to aimless drifting into it - certainly requires BLUE to be strong and, if focused ambition is involved, the emergence of the ORANGE vMEME. RED will also need to strong to assert “This is who I am” identity statements.

There is such a thing as too much ‘ego identity’ where a person is so involved in a particular role in a particular society or subculture that there is no room left for tolerance. Erikson labels this maladaptive tendency ‘fanaticism’. A fanatic believes that his way is the only way. Adolescents are, of course, known both for their idealism and for their tendency to see things in black-and-white. These people will gather others around them and promote their beliefs and life-styles without regard to others' rights to disagree. (Don Beck (2003) calls this ‘zealotry’ and sees it as an effect of thinking that is caught either in the transition from RED to BLUE or a harmonic of those vMEMES - see Assimilation-Contrast Effect.)

The lack of identity is perhaps more difficult still, and Erikson refers to the malignant tendency here as ‘repudiation’. They repudiate their membership in the world of adults and, even more, they repudiate their need for an identity. Some adolescents allow themselves to ‘fuse’ with a group, especially the kind of group that is particularly eager to provide the details of your identity: religious cults, militaristic organisations, groups founded on hatred, groups that have divorced themselves from the painful demands of mainstream society. They may become involved in destructive activities - eg: drugs and/or alcohol - or they may withdraw into their own psychotic fantasies. After all, being ‘bad’ or being ‘nobody’ is better than not knowing who you are! This state most likely indicates a failure of BLUE to consolidate as the dominant vMEME, with RED struggling to acquire esteem in whatever way it can - Nicholas Emler (1984) termed this negative reputation. This can lead to PURPLE facilitating unhealthy bonds - eg: gangs.

If you successfully negotiate this 5th stage, you will have the virtue Erikson called fidelity. Fidelity means loyalty, the ability to live by society’s standards in spite of their imperfections and incompleteness and inconsistencies. Fidelity means that you have found a place in that community, a place that will allow you to contribute.
Elements for a positive outcome
The adolescent must make a conscious search for identity. This is built on the outcome and resolution to conflict in earlier stages.
Elements for a negative outcome

If the adolescent cannot make deliberate decisions and choices, especially about vocation, sexual orientation and life in general, role confusion becomes a threat.
Examples
Adolescents attempt to establish their own identities and see themselves as separate from their parents.