RETHINKING ERIK ERIKSON

RETHINKING ERIK ERIKSON’S DEVELOPMENTAL MODEL

Since I have been considering sustainability from an individual as well as an organizational point of view, my mentor referred me to Terrance Real’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It and Jean Miller and others’ The Healing Connection. Both books do a full court press on the importance of sustained connections with caregivers and the serious consequences that follow from breaks in relationships. Both also use case examples as teaching tools and include disclosures of the clinician about her/his in-session practices processes and methods, so that a reader does not have to already subscribe to a clinical school and point of view to be able to think critically about the material. Both challenge the notion of an uninvolved or removed therapeutic actor. Relationship itself is the both the cause and the cure.

This Buberesque “I-Thou” frame of reference has always been a significant strand in the therapeutic community; but it had been relegated to the touchy feely Rogerians and others of their ilk. More feminine and less potent clinicians like Social Workers, Chaplains, and Nurses used to advocate for this approach. Potent and masculine therapies were more cognitive and behavioral and emphasized thought and reason and control. The third path was chemical or electrical; shocking or drugging a “disorder” into submission.

My Dad was a girly therapist. As a South African GP with a practice in the African Townships, he had worked with Witch Doctors. He told me it was because they could communicate better than he could with his patients; that they understood the context. After emigrating here in the sixties, he became a psychiatrist and did family therapy. He called himself an Eriksonian Sullivanian with a Freudian Analytic foundation. He introduced art therapy to Richmond, Virginia. He died young and unrecognized. There were a group of these girly therapists associated with each other through the Virginia Treatment Center for Children. Mouche Lindermann and Virginia Saunders were also in my dad’s cadre. I don’t remember the names of the others and I think they might all be gone now. They would get together and attempt to fill in an 8X8 matrix based on Erikson’s developmental stages. They had oral, anal and genital correlations, introjects and projections, transferences and …. you get the picture. You can sense their struggle to be true to their faith and traditions, their clinical parents, and their experience of families as fundamental systems. I think they resonated with Erikson because he uncovered a developmental model that went beyond a model of pathology.

I don’t think Erikson ever wrote directly about families, but if you read his work, the intersection of the person with the context is at the heart of it. He wrote a wonderful little article in Daedalus in 1968 that actually evaluated leadership as the intersection of the individual leader with his community. Timing and context and individual synergy all folded together into an elegant property space diagram. As my Dad did, I think Erikson is pretty wonderful. Read his Childhood in Society for a foundation in his developmental model. I think Erikson missed something, though. Here are his eight stages:

Trust versus Mistrust
Autonomy versus Shame or Doubt
Initiative versus Guilt
Industry versus Inferiority
Identity versus Identity Confusion/Diffusion
Companionship (Mating) versus Isolation
Productivity versus Stagnation
Integrity versus Despair

A personality evolves through the resolution of the issue presented by each stage. The interaction between how the environment or context supports the resolution and the resolutions of prior stages drive and shape the resolution of the current stage. It is a dynamic model. It encompasses the entire life cycle. I think Erikson missed a stage between Productivity and Integrity. I would want to label that stage “Generativity”. In line with Terrance Real and Jean Miller, I would contrast it with Depression or Disconnection. It is the setting of the matrix or context for the following generation, the enabling of “Sustainability” for the human race and the planet. In Erikson’s day, I don’t think that the lifespan was long enough or the ecological crisis was present enough for him to see its outline. Look at what happens if this additional stage is interposed. The first three stages of childhood have to do with:

Connection = Trust versus Mistrust (Winnicot’s notion of “good enough mothering” is worth referring to to get the historical sense of this - and then Miller and Real)
Integrity = Autonomy (Me-I) versus Shame
Action = Initiative versus Guilt

The next three stages of youth and young adulthood then reiterate the same themes:

Action = Industry versus Inferiority
Integrity = Identity versus Identity Diffusion/Confusion
Connection = Companionship versus Isolation

In the frame I’m proposing, the next three stages of adulthood also reiterate the themes:

Action = Productivity versus Stagnation (Work Identity and Career Performance)
Connection = Generativity versus Depression
Integrity = Integrity versus Despair (Have I been true to my values and aspirations)

Note that there is another embedded response to the work of Real and Miller: that, while they have correctly focused the lens on a pivot for development that has been undervalued; there are two additional pivots for full development. I can subscribe to the notion that Connection is the base of the triangle of the three, the first line or precursor, but the other vectors must also be present and developed for a rich and full life.