1 Shortcomings of Texts in Human Development

Everything you do is based on the choices you make. It’s not your parents, your past relationships, your job, the economy, the weather, an argument, or your age that is to blame. You and only you are responsible for every decision and choice you make. Period. The moment you take responsibility for everything in your life is the moment you gain the power to change anything in your life.

– Strati Georgopoulos (Toronto, Canada)

In 1994, Joan Erickson, the wife of Erik Erikson, added a ninth stage to their eight stages of development (see below).

This ninth stage is experienced at the very upper end of the lifespan and is accompanied by a loss of physical health, friends, family members, and independence, in addition to isolation from society.

She argues that during the ninth stage, the crisis points in previous stages are reenacted.

For example, elderly adults confronting increasing physical and mental declines may lose trust in their own ability to care for themselves. According to Erikson, they are facing a crisis similar to the trust vs. mistrust experienced in stage one.

Joan Erikson believed that during the ninth stage, older adults can shift towards a more transcendent perspective, which increases life satisfaction. She describes transcendence as moving beyond the fear of death and regaining some of the skills that appeared in childhood such as playfulness and attraction to music.

BACKGROUND: Erikson’s Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development

Stage|Crisis|Virtue

Infancy | Trust vs Mistrust | Hope
Toddlerhood | Autonomy vs Shame | Will
Preschool | Initiative vs Guilt | Purpose
Childhood | Industry vs Inferiority | Competence
Adolescence | Identity vs Role Confusion | Fidelity
Young Adulthood | Intimacy vs Isolation | Love
Middle Adulthood | Generativity vs Stagnation | Care
Late Adulthood | Integrity vs Despair | Wisdom

There is a problem, however, with this type of approach. The same is true of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, as well as many others.

(1) These stages are “impressionistic” and backed up by very qualitative impressions of human development, more informed by the theoretical edifice of the 1950s, than by actual scientific data. This was fine in 1950 (“Childhood and Society” by Erik Erikson) when the Eriksons came out with this Eurocentric and sexist “eight stages of man,” view but it doesn’t fly very well, now. The “society” part is also weak; it is implied in the text but not elaborated in any significant way (for comparison purposes, see Freud’s 1929, “Civilization and its Discontents,” where the tensions between the individual and the community are extensively elaborated in spite of the book’s shortcomings). The Eriksons also tend to downplay the biological, the role of parents and siblings, ethnicity, one-parent and gay families, role reversal, and divorce.

(2) Think about it this way: What does it mean for an infant to have “hope?” (see above; the central virtue of infancy). There is no research that suggests that infants (birth – 2 years) experience the emotion of hope or have even a “cognitive model” of such a feeling state. The same could be said of the other stages, to a greater or lesser extent. They are all impressionistic, but they sound reasonable because they are overly simplistic.

Another example. Let’s take his 5th stage (adolescence) in which Erikson argues that the central theme of adolescence is an “identity crisis” in spite of the fact that many adolescents never actually experience anything like it. To be sure, it has been popularized in the media because it’s easy to understand and can be tied to many other things during this period of life regardless of whether it is actually true (or “true” about a particular adolescent or a particular adolescent social group) or tells us anything useful about this period of life.

(3) If we switch to Piaget’s theory (“The Origins of Intelligence in the Child,” English trans., 1953) we are met with similar problems. While, the “sensorimotor stage” (birth – 18 months) is a tour de force (circular reactions, instrumental intelligence–means-ends relations, and interiorization of symbolic thought; discussed in my book, “Mind Embodied: The Evolutionary Origins of Complex Cognitive Abilities in Modern Humans”: Mind Embodied: The Evolutionary Origins of Complex Cognitive Abilities in Modern Humans), he then makes a transition to “operational thought”–his discussion of “intuitive thought” is equally confusing–and leaves out all that “bodily-kinesthetic intelligence,” “embodied cognition,” and many other features of human cognition behind (e.g., numeracy in infants, language, the beginnings of social cognition, and so on) and gets trapped in a theoretical edifice of his own design.

Noam Chomsky, formerly of MIT, has been a prominent critic of Piaget’s theories particularly as it applies to language and language development. Most current theories of cognition and cognitive development reject Piaget’s views. See, for example, Elizabeth Spelke’s research at Harvard on the core cognitive capacities or “core knowledge” of human beings arising in infancy: Elizabeth Spelke).

So, Piaget’s significance is largely historical. But, then the same could be said for Erikson. We won’t be extensively discussing these theories of human development because they are often uninformative and frankly outdated. Indeed, the same could be said of Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual stages.