Lesson 5 - Erikson's World View

Presentation of Theoretical Construct

Lecture Information:

Erikson's Assumptions

•Erikson believed that the "Self” can only be developed with “others,” that it is due to our living and growing up with family, friends, foes and everyone else that we can say who it is that we are.  This interaction with others, for Erikson, can be at once good/healthy or bad/unproductive.  He sees people being faced with a fork in the road, one branch good and the other bad for development, at each stage of a development process that evolves over a life-span.  This concept of a fork  leads to the first assumption made by Erikson:

–Life is made up of dualities:
As hinted at above, this concept of extreme opposites is the cornerstone on which he rests the mechanism of his theory.  He sees life as a series of dualities not unlike the way that a physicist would look at the dimensions of reality.  You cannot have an "up" without a "down" or an "in" without an "out." 

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–Extremes are part of the same continuum:
These extremes all have a common thread of some kind that gives each of the extremes their full meaning.  In the case of "up/down" the extremes are connected by the spatial dimension of height.  Without that concept connecting the two extremes, each would be meaningless by themselves.  So in a way these extremes are part of each other for Erikson.

–Extremes are in conflict with each other:
Although the extremes at either end of an Eriksonian duality are part of one another, they will never reconcile.  They were born to conflict with each other.  As soon as an object moving "in" begins to move out it ceases to be an "in" but changes to an "out" moving object.  This crisis, as he originally put it, will always exist for Erikson. 

–Extremes have a positive and negative impact:
In Erikson's Psycho-Social theory, there is a positive side to the continuum and a negative side.  That is to say that there is one side that leads to productive results for a person while the other side leads to unproductive results for the person.  You could probably think of this as a healthy alternative and an unhealthy alternative.  The result depends on the nature of the interaction between the "self" and "others" that occurs in all of the different issues people experience at various stages of life.

–Resolving the conflict is a kind of movement:
It is here where Erikson sees the dynamic or mechanism that moves people through life.  It is in the act of resolving these conflicts either positively, leading to personal growth, or negatively, leading to decay, that causes the movement in the development of a life.  You are either successful or unsuccessful while grappling with various problems central to different stages throughout life.  The result is growth or decay.

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