A corresponding personality assessment methodology is a convenient mechanism for analyzing individual development. As a model to describe my growing up, I can use Erikson’s framework. It, as Knight states, includes eight basic stages – infancy, early childhood, play age, school age, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, and old age (wisdom) (1050). At each of these stages, I, like most other people, demonstrated distinctive psycho-social properties that determined my personality type.
In infancy, I built my worldview on the concepts of trust and mistrust. As a child, I was as independent as possible, and at an early stage, I showed autonomy, which is an element of this stage of development, according to Knight (1051). Later, during my play age, I began to realize that I could not cope with all the tasks alone. As a result, my social skills developed, and I started to feel responsibility and guilt for some actions. My school-age period was characterized by zeal and sometimes obstinacy. As Knight argues, at this stage, children often form basic ideas about the values and foundations of relationships among people (1051). As a result, before entering adolescence period, I was an exemplary student with a good academic background.
At the adolescence stage, my worldview began to change under the influence of peers’ views and extended communication ties. As Knight notes, during this period, “identity is the main ego task and focus,” and this manifested itself at the shift of my interests, although I was not a selfish teenager (1049). By the time of young adulthood, I had had ideas about what was considered good and bad in society and could choose a specific way of personal development. Today, I have retained some of the qualities inherent in my childhood, in particular, stubbornness and independence, which, however, acquired more smooth forms.
Freud’s and Erikson’s Stages
When comparing Freud’s and Erikson’s approaches to the development of personality, one can note the different nature of the authors’ concepts. Freud’s five steps (“the Oral, the Anal, the Phallic, the Latent, and the Genital”), as Purushothaman and Varsha note, focus on a sexual background, while Erikson’s stages characterize psycho-social behavior (1824). However, these approaches have some common properties in the context of separation into the corresponding phases of development.
Influence of Erikson’s Biography
Erikson’s biography left an imprint on his professional work and interests. Willock mentions the psychologist as “the architect of relational identity” since this activity emphasized Erikson’s personal motives and aspirations (571). The lack of information about the biological father and his Jewish origin were the drivers that prompted Erickson to study the characteristics of human identity and individual nature and consider personality traits in detail.
Knight, Zelda Gillian. “A Proposed Model of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Linked to Erik Erikson’s Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development.” Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, vol. 24, no. 5, 2017, pp. 1047-1058.
Purushothaman, Kavya, and K. Varsha. “Psychoanalytic Study of Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock through Freud’s Electra Complex.” International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 119, no. 15, 2018, pp. 1823-1829.
Willock, Brent. “Erik Erikson’s Place in Relational Psychoanalysis: Discussion of “Some Thoughts on Trust and Betrayal”.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 28, no. 5, 2018, pp. 569-580.