Psychosocial Theory Essay

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Psychosocial Theory 1 Running Head: PSYCHOSOCIAL THEORY Erick Erickson’s Psychosocial Theory Psy 100 11/12/2006 Psychosocial Theory 2 Erik Erikson has become one of the most influential psychoanalysts of our time. His psychosocial theory changed the way that psychologists today think about social reasoning. Unlike other theories that were made, Erikson’s theory spans throughout an entire lifespan. It begins from the early (infancy) stages of life and continues on until the elderly years of a human’s life. This paper will discuss the 8 psychosocial theories that Erikson made and will analyze the validity of each of the stages. Erik Erikson was born in 1932 at Frankfurt Germany to Danish parents. Under the direction of Anna Freud, the daughter of the late Sigmund Freud, he began to study psychoanalysis. After spending time traveling around Europe, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1933 and filled a position at Harvard Medical School as America’s first child analyst (Sharkey, 1997). In addition to working at Harvard Medical School, he also had a private practice in child psychoanalysis. Later on in his life, he held teaching positions at University of California at Berkeley, Yale, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, Austen Riggs Center, and Center for Advanced Studies of the Behavioral Sciences. Erikson’s psychosocial theory expands the work of Sigmund Freud, developing them beyond adolescence. Freud believed that our personality was shaped by age five. Erikson developed a series of eight psychosocial theories. The principle is that we develop through a series of eight stages and our progress in each stage is predetermined by our success in the previous stages (Boeree, 1997). The stages are Trust vs. Mistrust, Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt, Initiative vs. Guilt, Industry vs. Inferiority, Identity vs. Role Confusion, Intimacy vs.

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