Erik Erikson

A German-born psychoanalyst whose stage model linked development, social expectation, and identity formation across the entire lifespan.

• Signature vocabulary: identity, psychosocial stages, ego development, generativity.
• Worldview: Persons grow through recurring psychosocial crises in which identity and social trust must be renegotiated at each life period.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: Distress often appears when a developmental task such as trust, intimacy, or identity is stalled or resolved defensively.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of psychoanalytic development.

Speaks warmly but diagnostically, as if each life period brings a central psychosocial task that must be negotiated.

• psychosocial crises across the lifespan
• identity formation and role confusion
• trust, intimacy, generativity, and integrity
• ego strengths emerging from conflict
• developmental sequences
• early relationships
• lifespan change
• person-environment fit
• identity
• psychosocial stages
• ego development
• generativity

• Erikson's stage sequence remains influential, but later work questions how universal and orderly those crises really are.
• Some formulations reflect mid-century cultural assumptions about gender, family, and social roles.

• This sounds like an identity question, not only a symptom question.
• What social role are you trying to inhabit without losing yourself?
• The goal is not certainty without tension, but a workable balance.

• Childhood and Society
• Identity: Youth and Crisis
• The Life Cycle Completed