Question

Describe the first five stages of Erik Erickson’s Theory of personality.

Answer 1

Erik Erickson:

Erickson like Homey emphasized (1902-1944) the importance of thinking process of the conscious mind, unlike Freud whose primary focus was an unconscious mind. Erickson developed a new approach to developmental milestones. He introduced eight stages a psychosocial development where he described the 8 chief conflict areas of crises along with their respective favorable and unfavorable outcomes which play a key role in personality development at that particular stage.

Stage	Crisis	Favourable Outcome	Unfavourable Outcome
1st	Trust vs Mistrust	Faith in the environment and future events	Suspicion fear of future events.
2nd	Autonomy vs Shame and doubt	Asense of self-control and adequacy	Feeling of shame and doubt on self.
3rd	Initiatives vs Guilt	To self start initiate one's own activity	All alone a sense of inadequacy and guilt
4th	Industry vs inferiority	Learns how things work, can understand and organise material	Feels a sense of inferiority in understanding and organising and guilt.
5th	Indentify vs rule confusion	Perceiving oneself as a unique and integrated individual.	Confusion over one really is.