Middle Adulthood & Older Adulthood

Paper Summary:

This paper is about Erikson's theory of the last two stages of development (the "Middle Adulthood" and "Older Adulthood") and how they relate to life's challenges. Eric Erikson was a German born American Psychoanalyst, known as a Freudian ego-psychologist who accepted most of the basic theories of Freud, but placed more emphasis on the societal and cultural aspects of psychology rather than on instincts and the unconscious. He refined and expanded Freud's theory of stages of development by putting forward an epigenetic principle of development, which states that the human personality unfolds progressively in eight distinct stages of life. He was a staunch believer that human development continues into adulthood and old age and is just as important as it was in the earlier parts of our lives. This paper analyzes the "Middle Adulthood" stage of development which relates to the period in life during which we are involved in raising children, generally described as the period between the ages of 40 to 65 and the "Older Adulthood" which refers to the age around retirement when the task of "parenting" is over.

From the Paper:

"Erikson has described two basic "tasks" or "crises" for each stage of our development stage. One is a positive task and the other a negative task. While the development of the positive task is desirable, some assimilation of the negative task is also necessary for a balanced development of human personality. For example in the first (infant) stage, the tasks are "trust" and "mistrust." While trust is the positive and desirable task to be learnt by the infant, a little bit of "mistrust" is also necessary for a "balanced" development. Too much of trust and no mistrust would make the infant a gullible fool in later life. (Ibid.) Erikson's theory is that we carry forward some maladjustment or malignancy into the next stage, if our progress in a particular stage of development is not "balanced." While maladjustment refers to over-development of the positive task, malignancy is the over-development of the negative "task." Obviously, the tilting of the balance in favor of the negative trait is more damaging for an individual."

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