Erik Erikson's theories of personality development: eight stages of personality development. Erikson's age periodization: basic principles of the theory, stages of personality development and reviews from psychologists

E. Erikson's life course model examines the psychosocial aspects of the formation of the human “I”. E. Erikson was based on three principles:

First, he suggested that there are psychological stages of development of the “I”, during which the individual establishes basic guidelines in relation to himself and his social environment.

Secondly, E. Erikson argued that the formation of personality does not end in adolescence and youth, but covers the entire life cycle.

Thirdly, he proposed dividing life into eight stages, each of which corresponds to a dominant parameter of the development of the “I”, which takes on a positive or negative value.

Positive development is associated with the self-realization of the individual, the achievement of happiness and success in life and is characterized, according to Erikson, by a certain logic of changing the positive parameters of the development of the “I”. Negative development is associated with various forms of personality degradation, life disappointments, and a feeling of inferiority. This vector of personality development is also characterized by a certain sequence, but of negative parameters of the development of the “I”. The question of which principle will prevail is not resolved once and for all, but arises anew at each subsequent stage. In other words, transitions from a negative vector to a positive one and vice versa are possible. The direction in which development will go - towards a positive or negative parameter - depends on the person’s success in resolving the main problems and contradictions of each stage of life.

The age boundaries of the eight stages of life identified by Erikson, along with the dominant parameters of the development of the “I” characteristic of them, are presented in Table 2.

table 2

Full life cycle according to E. Erikson

Istage(0-1 year) - “trust – distrust.” During the first year of life, the baby adapts to its new environment. The degree of trust with which he relates to the world around him, other people and himself, depends to a great extent on the care shown to him. If the baby’s needs are met, he is played and talked to, caressed and rocked to sleep, then he will gain trust in the environment. If a child does not receive proper care, does not receive loving care and attention, then he develops distrust towards the world in general and people in particular, which he carries with him into the next stages of development.

IIstage(1-3 years) – “independence – indecisiveness.” At this stage, the child masters various movements and actions, learns not only to walk, but also to run, climb, open and close, push and pull, throw, etc. Kids are proud of their new abilities and strive to do everything themselves. If parents give the child the opportunity to do for himself what he is capable of, then he develops independence and confidence in mastering his body. If teachers show impatience and rush to do everything for the child, then he develops indecisiveness and shyness.

IIIstage(3-6 years) – “enterprising - feeling of guilt.” A preschool child has already acquired many motor skills - running, jumping, riding a tricycle, throwing and catching a ball, etc. He is inventive, comes up with activities for himself, fantasizes, bombards adults with questions. Children whose initiative in all these areas is encouraged by adults develop an entrepreneurial spirit. But if parents show the child that his motor activity is harmful and undesirable, that his questions are intrusive and inappropriate, and that his games are stupid, he begins to feel guilty and carries the feeling of guilt into the next stages of life.

IVstage(6-11 years old) – “skill – inferiority.” This stage coincides with primary school, where academic success becomes of great importance for the child. A well-performing student receives confirmation of his skill, and constantly lagging behind his peers in his studies develops a feeling of inferiority. The same thing happens in connection with the child’s mastery of various work skills. Parents or other adults who encourage a younger student to make something with his own hands, rewarding him for the results of his work, reinforce the emerging skill. If, on the contrary, educators see children’s work initiatives as mere “pampering,” they contribute to perpetuating feelings of inferiority.

Vstage(11-18 years old) – “identification of “I” - “confusion of roles”.” Erikson considers this stage of life, covering adolescence and youth, to be one of the most important in the development of personality, since it is associated with the formation of a holistic idea of ​​\u200b\u200bone's “I” and one’s connections with society. A teenager is faced with the task of summarizing everything he knows about himself as a school student, an athlete, a friend of his friends, the son or daughter of his parents, etc. He must collect all these roles into a single whole, comprehend it, connect it with the past and project it into the future. If a young person successfully copes with this task - psychosocial identification, then he has a clear idea of ​​who he is, where he is and where he should move next in life.

If in the previous stages of life a teenager has already developed trust, independence, enterprise and skill with the help of parents and educators, then his chances of successfully identifying the “I” increase significantly. But if a teenager enters this stage with a burden of mistrust, indecision, feelings of guilt and inferiority, it is much more difficult for him to define his “I”. A symptom of a young person’s dysfunction is “role confusion” - uncertainty in understanding who he is and what environment he belongs to. Erickson notes that such confusion is typical, for example, among juvenile delinquents.

VIstage(18-30 years old) – “closeness – loneliness.” The main task of the early adulthood stage is to find close people outside the parental family, that is, to create your own family and find a circle of friends. By intimacy, Erickson means not only physical closeness, but mainly the ability to care for another person and share everything that is significant with him. But if a person does not achieve intimacy either in friendship or in marriage, loneliness becomes his lot.

VIIstage(30-60 years old) – “universal humanity – self-absorption.” At this stage, a person achieves his highest social status and success in his professional career. The norm for a mature personality is the formation of universal humanity as the ability to take an interest in the destinies of people outside the family circle, think about future generations, and bring benefit to society through their work. Those who have not developed this sense of “belonging to humanity” remain absorbed only in themselves and personal comfort.

VIIIstage(over 60 years old) – “integrity – hopelessness.” This is the last stage of life when the main work ends and the time of reflection on life begins. A feeling of wholeness and meaningfulness in life arises for those who, looking back on their lives, experience satisfaction. Anyone who sees their life as a chain of small goals, annoying mistakes, unrealized opportunities, understands that it is too late to start over and that what has been lost cannot be returned. Such a person is overcome by despair and a feeling of hopelessness at the thought of how his life could have turned out, but did not work out.

The main idea that follows from the description of the eight stages of life and is fundamental for this model as a whole is the idea that a person makes his own life, his own destiny. The people around him can either help him in this or hinder him.

The stages of life are connected by relationships of continuity. The younger the child, the more successfully his or her passage through the relevant stages directly depends on parents and teachers. The older a person gets, the more important previous development experience becomes - success or failure in previous stages. However, even “negative continuity” is not, according to Erikson, fatal in nature, and failure in one stage of life can be corrected by subsequent successes in other stages.

Pedagogical age periodization.

In modern pedagogical science, the periodization of childhood and school age has been adopted, the basis of which - stages of mental and physical development and the conditions in which education takes place, studied in different years by domestic psychologists (L.I. Bozhovich, L.S. Vygotsky, A.A. Davydov, A.N. Leontiev, A.V. Petrovsky and etc.). The following periods of development of children and schoolchildren are distinguished:

infancy (up to 1 year);

early childhood (1-3 years);

pre-preschool age (3-5 years);

preschool age (5-6 years);

junior school age (6-7-10 years),

middle school, or adolescence (11-15 years);

senior school age, or early adolescence (15-18 years).

Each age or period of human development is characterized by the following indicators:

a certain social situation of development or that specific form of relationship into which a person enters with other people in a given period;

main or leading activity;

main mental neoplasms (from individual mental processes to personality traits).

Development in the first year of life. Immediately after birth, the child enters a special and brief period of infancy neonatal period. The neonatal period is the only period of human life when only innate, instinctive forms of behavior are observed, aimed at satisfying organic needs that ensure survival. By the age of 3 months, the child gradually develops two functional systems- social and subject contacts. All reflexes and automatisms present at birth can be divided into four main groups:

reflexes that provide the basic needs of the body: sucking, defensive, orienting and special motor ones - grasping, supporting and stepping;

protective reflexes: strong skin irritations cause the limb to be withdrawn, flashing before the eyes and an increase in the brightness of the light lead to a narrowing of the pupil;

orientation-food reflexes: touching the lips and cheeks of a hungry child causes a search reaction;

atavistic reflexes: clinging, repulsion (crawling), swimming (a newborn moves freely in water from the first minutes of life).

Unconditioned reflexes, ensuring survival, are inherited from animals and are subsequently included as constituent elements in other, more complex shapes behavior. Nothing develops in a child just on the basis of atavistic reflexes. Thus, the clinging reflex (squeezing the handle to irritation of the palm) disappears before grasping appears (squeezing the handle to irritation of the fingers). The crawling reflex (with emphasis on the soles) also does not develop and does not serve for movement - crawling will begin later with movements of the arms, rather than pushing off with the legs. All atavistic reflexes usually fade away in the first three months of life.

Immediately after birth, the child already has sensations of all modalities, elementary forms of perception, memory, and thanks to this, further cognitive and intellectual development becomes possible. The sensations of a newborn are undifferentiated and inextricably linked with emotions.

From the first minutes of life, negative emotions are recorded in the child associated with the need to satisfy basic needs (food, warmth), and only towards the end of the first - beginning of the second month of life does the child develop positive emotions in response.

At the beginning of the second month, the child reacts to an adult, and then to physical objects in the form of separate behavioral reactions - he concentrates, freezes, smiles or hums appear. In the third month of life, this reaction becomes a complex and basic form of behavior called « revitalization complex." At the same time, the child focuses his gaze on the person and animatedly moves his arms and legs, making joyful sounds. This indicates that the child has developed a need for emotional communication with adults, that is, the first social need. The emergence of a “revitalization complex” is considered a conventional boundary between newborns and infancy.

The period of infancy. It is in infancy that the child’s functional systems of social and objective contacts begin to form and develop. Main directions of development:

1. Communication with adults. From 4-5 months, communication with adults becomes selective, the child learns to distinguish “friends” from “strangers.” Direct communication related to the need to care for the child is replaced by communication about objects and toys, which becomes the basis for the joint activities of the child and the adult. From the age of 10 months, in response to adults naming an object, the child takes it and hands it to the adult. This already indicates the emergence, along with emotional-gestural communication, of a new form of communication - objective communication.

The growing need for communication gradually comes into conflict with the child’s expressive capabilities, which leads first to understanding speech, and then to mastering it.

2. Speech acquisition. An increased interest in human speech is recorded in a child from the first months of life. The chronology of speech development at this age is as follows:

1 month - pronunciation of any simple sounds (“a-a”, “oo-u”, “uh”);

2-4 months - hooting appears (pronunciation of simple syllables - “ma”, “ba”);

4-6 months - humming (repetition of simple syllables - “ma-ba”, “ba-ma”), the child begins to distinguish intonations in the adult’s voice;

7-8 months - babbling appears (pronunciation of words that do not exist in the nature of the native language - “vabam”, “gunod”), understanding appears individual words adult, the intonations in the child’s voice are different;

9-10 months - the first words are recorded in speech, the child begins to understand the connection between the object itself and its name.

By the end of infancy, the child accurately understands an average of 10-20 words and reacts to them in a certain way, pronouncing 1-2 words.

3. Development of movements. During the first year, the child actively masters progressive movements: learns to hold his head up, sit up, crawl, move on all fours, take a vertical position, take an object and manipulate it (throw, knock, swing). But the child may also develop “dead-end” movements that inhibit development: sucking fingers, looking at hands, bringing them to the face, feeling hands, rocking on all fours. Progressive movements provide an opportunity to learn new things, while dead-end movements fence one off from outside world. Progressive movements develop only with the help of adults. Lack of attention to the child contributes to the emergence and strengthening of dead-end movements.

4.Emotional development. In the first 3-4 months, children develop a variety of emotional states: surprise in response to the unexpected (inhibition of movements, slowing of the heart rate), anxiety in response to physical discomfort (increased movements, acceleration of the heart rate, squinting of the eyes, crying), relaxation when a need is satisfied. After the appearance of the revitalization complex, the child reacts favorably to any adult, but after 3-4 months he begins to become somewhat lost at the sight of strangers. Anxiety especially increases at the sight of a stranger at 7-8 months, and at the same time the fear of separation from the mother or another loved one appears.

5.Personal development expressed by the appearance of a crisis of 1 year . The crisis is associated with a surge in the child’s independence, the development of walking and speech, and the emergence of affective reactions in him. Outbursts of affect in a child occur when adults do not understand his wishes, words or gestures, and also when adults do not do what he wants.

Pre-school period(early childhood). The physical strength and experience in manipulating objects accumulated over the first year causes the child to have a great need for active activity. The development directions outlined in the previous period are being improved and new ones are emerging:

1.Mastering upright walking. The help of adults, their approval and stimulation of activity in this direction creates the need for walking. Complete mastery of upright walking is associated not so much with making walking more difficult: going up and down hills, on steps, stepping on pebbles, etc., but with getting pleasure from walking upright and controlling your body. Mastering upright walking significantly expands the boundaries of the space available to the child and increases his independence.

2.Speech development. The development of speech is closely related to the child’s objective activity. “Mute” forms of communication (showing) become insufficient, the child is forced to turn to adults with various requests, but they can only make requests through speech.

The development of speech in a child proceeds simultaneously in two directions: understanding speech and the formation of his own speech. At first, the child understands the situation and fulfills the requests of only specific individuals (the mother). By the age of 1 year, he already knows and pronounces individual words, and then begins to learn the meaning of an increasing number of words. By the age of 1.5 years, a child knows the meaning of 30-40 to 100 words, but uses them relatively rarely in his speech. After 1.5 years, speech activity increases, and by the end of the 2nd year he uses up to 300 words, and by the end of the 3rd year - up to 1500 words. By the age of 2, the child speaks in two to three word sentences, and by the age of 3, children are able to speak freely.

3. Play and productive activities. Game like the new kind the child’s activity appears in the process of manipulating objects and learning their purpose. In the first year of life, there is practically no direct interaction between children, and only by the age of two do children have their first real contacts with play partners.

Only in the third year of life do the child’s productive activities begin to take shape, which reach their fullest forms at subsequent stages - drawing, modeling, designing, etc.

4. Intellectual development. The main direction of development of higher mental functions in young children is the beginning of verbalization of cognitive processes, i.e. their mediation by speech. Verbalization gives impetus to the development of a new type of thinking - visual-figurative. The formation of imaginative thinking in early childhood is accompanied by a fairly developed imagination. Imagination, like memory, during this period of childhood is still involuntary and arises under the influence of interest and emotions (for example, while listening to fairy tales, the child tries to imagine their characters, events and situations).

5. Personal development. The end of early childhood is marked by the birth of the “I” phenomenon, when the child begins to call himself not by name, but by the pronoun “I”. The appearance of the psychological image of one’s “I” marks the birth of the child’s personality and the formation of self-awareness. The emergence of a new surge in the need for independence through the expression of one’s will leads to the collapse of the previous social situation of development, which manifests itself in the crisis of three years. The verbal expression of the 3-year-old crisis is “I myself” and “I want.” The desire to be like an adult, the desire to perform the activities that he observes in adults (turn on the light, go to the store, cook dinner, and so on) immeasurably exceed the child’s real capabilities and it is impossible to satisfy all of them. It is during this period that for the first time the child begins to notice manifestations of stubbornness and negativism directed against the adults who constantly look after him and take care of him.

Preschool period. This period is responsible in terms of preparing the child for important stage his life - schooling. Main directions of development of the period:

1. Game activity. Preschool age is characterized by the intensity of games as the leading activity of a preschooler. The games of preschoolers go through a serious development process: from object-manipulative games to plot-role-playing games with rules and symbolic games.

Younger preschoolers still usually play alone. They are dominated by object-based and construction games, and role-playing games reproduce the actions of the adults with whom they interact on a daily basis. At middle school age, games become joint, and the main thing in them is the imitation of certain relationships between people, in particular role-playing ones. Certain rules of the game are created that children try to follow. The themes of the games are different, but usually family roles (mom, dad, grandmother, son, daughter), fairy-tale (wolf, hare) or professional (doctor, pilot) predominate.

In older preschool age, role-playing games become significantly more complex, and the range of roles increases. It is specific that real objects are often replaced by their conventional substitutes (symbols) and the so-called symbolic game arises. For the first time, in the games of older preschoolers, one can notice leadership relationships and the development of organizational abilities.

2.Development of intelligence. Visual-figurative thinking is replaced by verbal-logical thinking, which presupposes the ability to operate with words and understand the logic of reasoning. The child’s ability to use verbal reasoning when solving problems is manifested by the phenomenon of “egocentric speech.” », so-called speech “for oneself”. This helps the child focus and maintain attention and serves as a means of managing working memory. Then, gradually, egocentric speech utterances are transferred to the beginning of the activity and acquire a planning function. When the planning stage becomes internal, which happens towards the end of the preschool period, egocentric speech gradually disappears and is replaced by internal speech.

3. Personal development. The game develops reflection - the ability to adequately analyze one’s actions, motives and correlate them with universal human values, as well as the actions and motives of other people. The emergence of reflection in a child determines the emergence of a desire to meet the requirements of adults and to be recognized by them. The gender-role identification of children is completed: adults require the boy to display “masculine” qualities and encourage activity; They require soulfulness and sensitivity from girls.

New motives for activity are formed: cognitive and competitive. Preschool age is the age of “why”. At 3-4 years old, the child begins to ask: “What is this?”, “Why?”, and by the age of 5 – “Why?”. However, at first, the child asks most questions in order to attract attention, and a persistent interest in knowledge arises only in older preschool age.

E. Erikson: stages of psychosocial development

Today, even a person who is extremely far from psychology knows that very much in the personality of an adult is determined by his childhood. Psychologists “discovered” childhood as a key period of development relatively recently - systematic research into child psychology began in turn of the 19th century and XX centuries. Of course, enormous credit here belongs to psychoanalysis, starting with the works of its founder S. Freud, but all other directions and schools of psychology have paid (and are paying) very much great attention the first years of human life.

As a result, even such a extreme point view, according to which everything that is characteristic of a person in mature years should be explained exclusively by the characteristics of his child development: not only in the community of professional psychologists, but also in everyday everyday conversations, we constantly hear about “children’s complexes”, “childhood traumas”, “parental programming”, etc.

On the one hand, the power of childhood experience is truly undeniable. On the other hand, one may get the erroneous impression that after childhood, human development stops altogether, and the entire later life it is only doomed to reap the fruits sown in the first few years of its existence.

Of course, this is not true. Continuing to intensively and scrupulously study the characteristics of child development and without in the least diminishing its significance for personality psychology, psychologists have long come to the conclusion that a person is developing system throughout life, until its last day.

This complicates the picture, but also gives us much greater freedom: we know that no matter how much our childhood experiences influence us, at any stage of our lives we can choose one path or another. An adult is not a frozen structure; Each of us has more or less constant qualities, a habitual style of behavior, but we are constantly changing, albeit not always aware of this. If much in our fate does not suit us, it is in our power to move on to conscious changes: The process of growth and development can be painful, but we can independently direct the course of our lives and make amendments to our life scenario.

One of the greatest psychologists of the twentieth century, Erik Erikson, developed a complex and detailed concept psychological development person throughout life. Being at first a follower of Freud and an adherent of psychoanalysis, Erickson went further, overcoming precisely that centering in the first years of life that we just mentioned. He "extended" the period active development a person far beyond childhood - extended it to the entire human life. His description of successive stages of development is still very popular in psychology today. Let's get familiar with this concept.

E. Erikson showed that a person in his development goes through eight stages in which his personal experience and the problem of choice are dramatically concentrated. Erikson defined these episodes as psychosocial crises (Erikson E. Childhood and Society. St. Petersburg, 1996). Each stage of development has its own specific conflict. Successful completion of the stage ends with the acquisition of a certain personal property. The absence of this property complicates the passage of the next stage.

1. Stage of basic trust - distrust

Age: from 0 to 2 years.

A newly born child has no idea either about himself or about the world in which he finds himself. Moreover, he has no boundary between “I” and “everything else”: he feels himself and the world as a single Universe. As long as he existed in his mother's womb, all his needs were satisfied before he had time to feel, much less realize them: he did not eat, did not breathe, did not evacuate bladder and intestines - all this happened by itself, oxygen and nutrients were supplied to his body, unnecessary ones were removed, the temperature was always maintained equally comfortable, etc.

After birth, the situation changes: now some time may pass between the emergence of a need and its satisfaction. Discomfort arises, the balance between satisfaction and dissatisfaction is disrupted. But at the same time, figures of adults who take care of the child enter the single and previously blurred world. At first, in his perception these are only some primitive, unclear images, but quite quickly the baby establishes a connection between the appearance of these figures and the elimination of his own discomfort. He begins to turn to adults, crying, informing them of his needs for food, warmth, and safety. Having discovered that most of his needs are met in a timely manner, the child receives a fundamental resource on the basis of which his development takes place: a sense of trust.

This trust allows the child to become aware of the exchange, in the process of which the feelings of “I” and “other” are learned. Psychologists call this mutual understanding. The pleasure of the first experience of communication - “I called for help, they helped me” - causes the baby’s first smile, which psychologists call social: not a reflexive grimace that looks like a smile, but a real smile addressed to another person - to the mother. The mother smiles back, for which the child rewards her with an even more joyful and conscious smile. The essence of mutual understanding is that each requires recognition from the other. This is how the first page appears in the child’s biography, telling about relationships.

Quick and adequate satisfaction of the baby's needs leads to the fact that he develops a feeling of reliability in the world around him. Events flow predictably, satisfying vital needs - the first and second levels Maslow's pyramids: physiological needs, need for safety and protection. This positive experience lays the foundation for a healthy personality - what Erikson called basic trust in the world.

It is important to emphasize that for successful completion At this stage, what is important is not the instant satisfaction of any need of the child, but rather the very quality of the mother’s relationship with the child. The experience of discomfort itself is natural and inevitable, even necessary for development. As Erikson wrote, there are few frustrations that a growing child cannot tolerate, but for healthy growth at this stage, parents must “convey to the child a deep, almost organic conviction that there is some meaning in what they are doing.”

basic trust versus basic mistrust.

Main purchase: trust in the world - “The world is reliable, I can live in it.”

2. Stage of autonomy - shame and doubt

Age: from 2 to 4 years.

This is the so-called “stubborn phase.” This entire period passes under the motto “I myself!” But as the child masters more and more new skills, the first doubts settle in him: am I right? Am I doing well? It is at this age that a child first experiences a feeling of shame. By the age of two, he gains the ability to consciously control urination and defecation, and this is his first experience of “self-control.” For the first time, the child makes certain demands on himself and his behavior. And he feels legitimate pride, discovering that he can really control himself, that he can do something on his own.

When parents shame a child for some failures, reproach him for not being able to do something correctly, make excessively strict demands on the “correctness” of his behavior, the feeling of shame becomes too strong.

“External control at this stage should firmly convince the child of his own strengths and capabilities. The child must feel that his basic trust in life... is not threatened by such a sharp turn in his life path: a sudden passionate desire to have a choice.<…>The firmness of external support should protect the child against the potential anarchy of his as yet untrained sense of discrimination, his inability to hold and release with discernment. When the environment encourages the child to “stand on his own two feet,” it should protect him from meaningless and random experiences of shame and premature doubt.”

Shame is a complex and insufficiently studied emotion, but it can be assumed, as E. Erikson did, that it is based on nothing more than anger directed at oneself. The feeling of shame makes the child feel a sense of his own insignificance and at the same time anger: initially this is anger towards those who shamed him, but since the child is weak and the adults are strong and authoritative, this anger turns inward rather than splashes out.

The main conflict of this stage: autonomy (independence) versus shame and doubt.

Main purchase: a sense of self-control, that is, the freedom to manage oneself without loss of self-respect. From this feeling grows a strong sense of goodwill, readiness for action, and pride in one’s achievements.

3. Stage of initiative - guilt

Age: from 4 to 6 years.

This is a period of self-affirmation. Children at this age are extremely active, they are constantly busy with something. A game is not just a game, but the creation of your own world, with its own laws and rules. The child enjoys learning new activities and really needs support and approval from adults. Thanks to warm emotional contact with adults, he becomes convinced that he is capable of much and can achieve the goals he has set for himself.

“Initiative adds to autonomy enterprise, planning and the desire to “attack” a task in order to be active, to be in motion, whereas previously self-will almost always pushed the child towards open disobedience or, in any case, towards protesting independence.”

The child’s enjoyment of his new motor and mental capabilities at this stage is very great, and this contains its own dangers. The child's behavior may be aggressive at times, especially towards potential rivals (e.g. younger brothers and sisters who interfere with the active activities of the elder and disrupt his plans); In addition to creativity, during this period the child also expresses the instinct of destruction, since in his fantasies he feels himself omnipotent.

Rigid suppression of a child’s excessive activity at this stage is fraught with the development of a feeling of guilt for his own initiative. With constant suppression, it gradually fades away and is replaced by depression and submission. We can recognize people who, at the age of five, were severely restrained in their endeavors and aspirations by the fact that when faced with any task, they “give up.”

They are not lazy, but they are simply afraid to take the initiative, because they are sure in advance that they will not be able to do anything well. People who, at the age of five, too often heard words like “you can’t do anything!”, “you’re doing everything wrong!”, “you’re doing some kind of nonsense!” – feel deeply guilty of their own inadequacy, even if in fact they act very successfully.

But unlimited connivance also has unfavorable consequences. Joint (both adults and the child) regulation of activities is necessary.

“Where the child, now so eager to govern himself strictly, can gradually develop a sense of moral responsibility, where he can gain some idea of ​​the institutions, functions, and roles that will be conducive to his responsible participation, he will make pleasing achievements in life.” mastery of tools and weapons, skillful handling of important toys and caring for younger children.”

The main conflict of this stage: initiative versus guilt.

Main purchase: initiative, self-confidence combined with the assimilation of moral standards, ideas about what can and cannot be done.

4. Stage of activity - failure

Age: girls - from 6 to 10 years, boys - from 6 to 12.

The child goes to school and for the first time truly enters social life. During this stage, the child begins to consciously work “for results”, learns to see and evaluate the fruits of his labors, begins to receive satisfaction from completed work, develops a taste for work, learns to win recognition without “grabbing” it by force, but by doing useful and necessary work. .

Children at this age sincerely strive to achieve as much as possible, get successful results and, of course, really need the support and encouragement of adults - now not only parents, but also teachers.

“The child develops diligence and hard work, that is, he adapts to the inorganic laws of the instrumental world. The child's ego includes within its boundaries his work tools and skills: the principle of work accustoms him to enjoy the completion of work through steady attention and persistent effort.

The danger that awaits a child at this stage is a feeling of inadequacy and inferiority. Failures in activities can lead to the child being relegated to more “safe” areas in his development. early stages, experiencing despair from his ineptitude and inability to cope with the matter.

“The development of many children is disrupted when family life failed to prepare the child for school life, or when school life does not confirm the hopes of the early stages.”

There is another danger - excessive concentration on work, education, work: this is a situation when parents limit the world of a child - a primary school student - to the circle of his responsibilities, demanding from him constant diligence and success in his studies, neglecting other areas of his personality. This often happens to parents who themselves are focused exclusively on achieving external, social success:

“...a fundamental danger is a person’s limitation of himself and the narrowing of his horizons to the boundaries of the field of his work... If he recognizes work as his only responsibility, and profession and position as the only criterion of a person’s value, then he can easily turn into a conformist and an unreasoning slave of technology and its masters "

The main conflict of this stage: hard work versus feelings of inferiority.

Main purchase: diligence, hard work, the ability to bring the work started to a successful completion.

5. Identification stage - role shifts

Age: girls - from 10 to 21 years, boys - from 12 to 23 years.

This is a very turbulent, intense stage of development, during which boys and girls grow into young men and women, finally realize their gender identity and learn to behave in accordance with their gender. Teenagers learn the “rules of the game,” as a rule, by imitating adults who have authority over them. At this age, passion, even falling in love, with a person who is a role model is very often noted. Thanks to this passion, knowledge of oneself occurs through another person (so in fact, this is falling in love with oneself in the mirror of another):

“To a large extent, youthful love is an attempt to achieve a clear definition of one’s own identity by projecting a vague image of one’s own ego onto another and seeing it already reflected and gradually becoming clearer. That's why so many youthful love conversations."

If in the process of this assimilation of roles some interference arises, if adolescents do not find adequate guidelines for themselves, confusion results: the young man does not know how to behave “like a man,” and may try to compensate for this ignorance by emphatically defiant behavior. Girls may develop some kind of distorted idea of ​​femininity, which in the future can lead to problems associated with motherhood. One of the main difficulties of this stage of development is the establishment of professional identity, that is, the answer to the question “Who do I want and can be.”

The main conflict of this stage: identity versus role confusion.

Main purchase: the formation of identity, that is, an integrated idea of ​​oneself as a representative of a certain gender, possessing abilities developed from inclinations, known opportunities offered by various social roles (the beginning of professional self-determination).

6. Stage of intimacy - isolation

Age: from 23 to 33 years.

Intimacy is the ability to create and maintain a truly intimate relationship with another person. It is at this age stage that people, as a rule, get married and create families, realizing this ability. In order for long-term close relationships to be possible, a person needs to learn to see and recognize the personality in another without losing himself. (Using A. Maslow’s terminology, we can say that highest level development at this stage is the acquisition of the ability for existential love.)

At this stage, a person (subject to harmonious psychological development) “is ready for intimacy or, in other words, is able to commit himself to relationships of an intimate and companionate level and to demonstrate moral strength by remaining faithful to such relationships, even if they may require significant sacrifices and compromises.”

This is the time of constant spiritual growth. It is at this stage of development that a person is born as a spiritual being.

If a person is unable to overcome his children's egocentrism, learn to feel another, he develops a fear of losing his “I”, which leads to painful isolation within himself, a feeling of eternal dissatisfaction and disorder.

“The danger of this stage is that a person experiences intimate, competitive and hostile relationships with the same people. But as the zones of adult responsibilities are outlined... relationships eventually become subject to that ethical sense that serves as a distinctive feature of an adult.”

Very briefly the results of development at this stage can be described famous saying S. Freud, who was once asked what he thought to an ordinary person one should be able to do it well. They expected a lengthy, “deep” answer from him, but he said only one thing: “Love and work.” You can develop this idea for as long as you like, revealing in detail the concepts of “love” and “work,” but the essence will not change. These are really the two areas in which a person must be wealthy in order to consider himself mentally complete.

The main conflict of this stage: intimacy versus isolation.

Main purchase: achieving ethical maturity, developing the ability to establish intimate relationships with another person, while maintaining the integrity of one’s “I”, the ability to develop and maintain full-fledged partnerships(not only in family life, but also in friendships and at work).

7. Stage of creativity - stagnation

Age: The peak of this stage occurs at 40-45 years.

Almost the basic need of a person at this stage becomes the need to care for others; the sense of clan manifests itself in interest in the next generation. This is the age at which, in order to maintain harmony in your own soul, you simply need to think and care more about others than about yourself. If this does not happen, a person becomes isolated on the problems of his age, his health, having a hard time experiencing the “passing of time.”

In order to avoid falling into the trap called the “age of loneliness,” it is very important for people during this period to learn something new, change their style and habits, and lead as open and active a lifestyle as possible.

“A mature person needs to be needed, and maturity needs stimulation and encouragement from those it has produced and cared for.”

Creativity (generativity) is an interest in the structure of life in general, in caring for the future generation, its support and guidance. In cases where such enrichment personal experience care for the young does not happen, a feeling of stagnation and impoverishment of life arises.

“People begin to pamper themselves as if each of them were their own and only child; and where conditions are favorable for this, early disability - physical or psychological - becomes a means of focusing care on oneself.”

The very fact of having one’s own children does not mean that a person has psychologically developed to this stage: on the other hand, people who successfully pass through it do not necessarily have to be teachers, educators, or mentors of youth. Caring for the future generation can be included in any activity. The main distinguishing feature is the awareness that we live not only for ourselves, but also for the future, and the desire to make a feasible contribution to this future.

The main conflict of this stage: generativity (creativity) versus stagnation (stagnation).

Main purchase: love for the young, sincere interest and care for the younger generation; a sense of belonging to social life.

8. Stage of Ego Integration – Despair

Here is the summation of the life lived. If all the previous stages passed harmoniously, if a person constantly grew and developed spiritually, lived a truly full, rich life, then now he experiences an incomparable feeling of harmony, order, peace with himself.

A person feels gratitude to his parents and does not feel the desire to live a different life, does not dream of what would happen if he could “start all over again.” He accepts himself, his life, feels like an absolutely whole, accomplished person.

“Only in someone who in some way cares about business and people and has adapted to the victories and defeats that are inevitable on the path of a person - a successor of a family or a producer of material and spiritual values, only in him can the fruit of all these seven stages gradually ripen. I know of no better word for such fruit than ego integrity.”

Ego integrity – acceptance of one’s one and only life path as something that was destined to happen, companionship with the way of life and other activities of past years, the experience of experience that conveys a certain world order and spiritual meaning, no matter how much was paid for it. “With such final consolidation, death loses its painfulness.”

The lack of integrity of the Ego gives rise to the fear of death, despair that there is too little time left and a “new life” can no longer be lived.

The main conflict of this stage: Ego integrity versus despair.

Main purchase: calm confidence that life was not lived in vain, a feeling of a successfully ending cycle.