Erikson’s Shift to the Psychosocial Level

Freud had also sketched a developmental theory for psychoanalysis. Built
upon his view of the primacy of the intrapsychic id and its bodily source of
energy, this theory focused on psychosexual development. For Freud, “sexual”
means more than the usual notion of genital sexuality; it is a more general
dynamic expression of bodily energy that manifests itself in different
forms at different developmental stages. The adult (genital) stage of sexuality,
reached at puberty, is the culmination and completion of one’s psychosexual
development. Preceding that development, Freud saw four pregenital
stages of psychosexual development: the oral stage, the anal stage, the
phallic stage, and the latency stage. Hence, for this theory of psychosexual
development, each stage is centralized as a stage by a particular expression
of sexual or erogenous energy. In each stage there is a particular mode of
the bodying forth of this energy as desire, manifested by the unique bodily
zone that becomes the erogenous zone of that specific stage. It is seen as
erogenous because of that bodily zone’s capacity to be especially susceptible
to stimulation or arousal, such that it becomes the prime source of bodily
satisfaction and pleasure at that stage.
Erikson concluded that this psychosexual level was a valid but incomplete
portrait of development. More than other proponents of ego psychology, he
sought to work with Freud’s emphasis on the bodily zones while striving to include that vision within a larger, more encompassing framework. Erikson
theorized that each bodily mode correlated with a psychological modality,
one that implicated the person’s developing ego relations with the world. In
particular, he emphasized one’s relations with other people as the most important
“profile” of the world. He saw the psychosexual meaning of the various
bodily zones grounded by changes in the person’s social existence at
each stage. For that reason, Erikson named his approach a theory of
psychosocial development and argued that the growth of the ego could not
be reduced to changes in bodily energies. He demonstrated how the psychosexual
dimension always implied a key human relation at the heart of each
stage, and so the interpersonal could not be reduced to some intrapsychic
cause but was itself the basis for the actual development of that stage.
The significance of this shift from the psychosexual level of development
to the psychosocial one was enormous, but it can best be appreciated in the
context of its depiction of each of the particular stages. One other impact
was also strikingly noteworthy. Whereas Freud’s theory of psychosexual development
saw the process as coming to an end with the person’s arrival at
the genital stage (with puberty), Erikson realized that the growth of the ego
in psychosocial development does not end there but continues in subsequent
stages throughout the person’s life. In that way, he also transformed
developmental psychology from its origins as merely a child psychology into
a truly life-span psychology, a revision now widely accepted. 316