The Life Cycle Completed

Rating:
Summary: Remains valuable as historical perspective
Review: Erikson's psychosocial stages of human development are standard fare in introductory psychology textbooks. In this slim volume you will find Erik's personal explanation of these stages and three short chapters by Joan (25 pages total) that elude to an additional ninth stage. Both authors were long-lived (Erik to 91; Joan to 93+), and, accordingly, offer a perspective that relatively few others will share.

Having spent most of the last year teaching cognitive psychology, I was struck by the antiquated writing style and absence of empirical justification for Erik's conclusions. He is clearly indebted to the clinical observations and theoretical formulations of Sigmund Freud, and he devotes his entire first chapter to the task of making this indebtedness clear. It reads as though he were attempting to justify his slight deviation from the master.

The second chapter is another apologia, this one specifically addressing the synthesis of Freud's psychosexual with Erik's psychosocial stages. It is in this chapter that Erik presents his (in)famous eight-stage chart, but it is not discussed in depth.

The more detailed elaboration of the eight stages is attempted in chapter three. Erik starts with old age, rather than with infancy, arguing that the end goal is necessary to understand how the stages relate. His stage explanations are filed with word etymologies, casual references to clinical examples, and sweeping generalizations that embrace world histories, social movements, and philosophies. It would be hard to imagine how one could write this material to be more distinct from the careful limitations and operational definitions required in current psychological research.

Erik's last contribution is an extension of the individual emphasis in psychoanalysis into the social realm where he develops the concept of ego development within a social milieu.

The concluding chapters by Joan are quite different from what comes before. She advocates a ninth stage beyond old age but does not explicitly define details compatible with Erik's earlier charts. Her metaphorical style paints a picture of gerotranscendance (emphasis on "dance") in which healthy resolution of earlier stage conflicts leads to a deepening appreciation of the past while living within the constrained, care-receiving present. In this present moment Joan finds an expansion of self that embraces others and a sense of communion with all things, including death itself. These chapters read like a self-eulogy rather than additional theoretical work.

I believe that more psychology students should read this book because it so clearly demonstrates the differences between what psychology once was and what psychology has become. There is quite a gulf between speculative theorizing and science. That a book this ensconced within the psychoanalytic worldview could have been published as late as 1982 gives one pause.