According to Erik Erikson personality is a universal pattern of a lifelong development. Further, he explains that every human being goes through seven main psychosocial stages throughout the span of life. In this paper I am examining the psychosocial stage of adolescents, the age bracket is between 12 to 19 years. Erikson’s first two stages cater the age bracket of birth till 3 months. His early stages are parallel with Freud’s theory but Erikson emphasizes more on social context. Trust vs. mistrust and autonomy vs. shame. Ego strength is the basic goal of these two stages that lay the foundation for other proceeding stages. According to Erikson, these early childhoods have no gender differences.
Erikson proposed that personality development proceeds through the fixed stages in terms of time duration and age and in certain bipolar dimensions. Between the ages of 3 to 5, the critical period of the development is initiative vs. guilt. Then a child proceeds to the stage of industry vs. inferiority between the years of 6 and 11.
From 13 to 19 years, the person enters in adolescence and the crucial purpose of this age is to gain self-identity vs. confusion in identity. This stage is one of the most delicate phases of life. And then the stage named intimacy vs. isolation. This stage starts from the age of 20 till the age of 25.
Then the process of generativity vs. stagnation occurs at the age of 25 to 60. And the final stage of integrity vs. despair happens in old age that is above 60.
In every stage of life, conflict arises due to the clash between the newly emerging personal needs and social demands and the failure of gaining the goal of the previous stage. The crisis is a normal phenomenon which leaves both positive and negative residues behind. And it can be solved many times in further stages.
In the first stage primary caregiver plays a crucial role in development, if the child fails to get trust from his/her mother (mostly), he/she can then be in the crisis of mistrust. Then in the second stage, if the child could not get autonomy from the parents, he/she will face the crisis of shame and doubt on the self.
