Psychosocial Stages of Adulthood

Beyond adolescence, Erikson also identified three psychosocial stages of
adulthood: early adulthood, middle age, and old age. The first, roughly the
period of one’s twenties and thirties, begins with the person’s moving out
from under the insulating protection of the adolescent psychosocial moratorium.
One’s choices (of marriage, career, family) cease to be “as if”; they
are now profoundly real commitments with long-term impact. Making such
commitments is not only a momentary event (such as saying “I do”) but requires
devoting oneself to living an ongoing and open-ended history. This
new situation inaugurates the next psychosocial development, which Erikson
names the crisis of intimacy versus isolation. Intimacy here has a
broader range than its connotation of sexual relations: It encompasses the
capacity to relate to another with fullness and mutuality. To be fully open
with and to another person entails obvious risks—of being misunderstood
or rejected—but with it comes the enormous gain of true love. To experience
the closeness, sharing, and valuing of the other without boundaries is
the hallmark of an infinite relationship (infinite, that is, not necessarily in
duration but in depth). The relationship with a loved other is the evident
psychosocial context of this growth. If it does not occur, then the early adult
will come to experience instead a deep sense of isolation and loneliness.
This consequence can accrue either through the failure to enter into a relationship
or through the failure, within a relationship, to achieve intimacy.
Some of the most terrible afflictions of isolation at this stage are within those
marriages so lacking in intimacy that the couple are essentially isolated even
though living together.

Beginning around age forty, a further stage of adult psychosocial development
begins: middle age. The situation has once again changed. People
are no longer merely starting out on their adulthood but have by now
achieved a place in the adult world. Typically, if they are going to have a family,
they have got it by now; if a career, they are well launched by now. Indeed,
middle age, the period from forty to sixty-five, marks the attainment of the
height of a person’s worldly powers and responsibilities. Whatever worldly
mountain one is going to climb in this lifetime, it is during middle age that
one gets as high up it as one will go. The arrival at this new position opens
the door to the next stage of development. Now the psychosocial growth will involve one’s social relations with the next generation, centered on the issue
of generativity versus stagnation. The long plateau of middle age offers the
opportunity to become helpful to those who follow along that upward
climb. These are, most immediately, one’s own children but also include the
next generation in the community, on the job, in the profession, in the
whole human family. The middle-aged adult is in the position of being the
teacher, the mentor, the instituter, the creator, the producer—the generator.
Having arrived at the peak of one’s own mountain, one no longer need
be so concerned about placating someone else and so is able now fully to be
oneself. To be an original, the middle-aged adult can also originate in the
truest sense: to give of oneself to those who, following along behind, need
that help. In this way, the person grows the specific ego-strength of care: an
extending of oneself to others in an asymmetric way, giving without expectation
of an equal return, precisely because one can. The failure to grow in
this way results in stagnation—the disillusioned boredom of a life going nowhere.
Some middle-aged adults, trying futilely to ward off this gnawing
feeling of stagnation, hide behind desperate efforts of self-absorption, what
Erikson called “treating oneself as one’s one and only child.”
By the late sixties, a variety of changes mark the onset of the final stage of
psychosocial development: old age. Retirement, becoming a grandparent,
declining health, and even the increasingly frequent death of one’s own agemates
precipitate a new issue into the forefront: one’s own mortality. While
people at every age know they are mortal, this knowledge has no particular
impact on one’s life when one is younger because it is then so easily overlooked.
In contrast, by old age, this knowledge of one’s mortality is now woven
into the very fabric of one’s everyday life in a way that it can no longer be
evaded by imagining it postponed until some distant, abstract future.
American society tends to avoid really confronting one’s being-towardsdeath.
Some psychologists have gone so far as to say that death has replaced
sex as the primary cultural taboo, hidden in hospital rooms and code words
(“passed on,” “put to sleep,” “expired”). Fearing death, people find it very
hard to grow old. If one is not available to the growth opportunities of this
stage, one is likely to sink instead into despair—a feeling of regret over a life
not lived. Often even one’s despair cannot be faced and is then hidden beneath
feelings of disgust and bitterness: a self-contempt turned outward
against the world.

Erikson points out that this final stage of life offers the opportunity for
the ultimate growth of the ego. To embrace one’s mortality fully allows one
to stand open-eyed at the edge of one’s life, a perspective from which it becomes
possible to really see one’s life as a whole. One can then see, and own,
one’s life as one’s own responsibility, admitting of no substitutes. It is this holistic
vision of one’s life that Erikson calls integrity: the full integration of the
personality. It is in this vision that people can actually realize that their own
lives are also integrated with life as a whole, in a seamless web of interconnections.
Thus, the ego finally finds its ultimate, transpersonal home within the whole of being. It is this perspective that opens the door to wisdom, the
final growth.

Sources for Further Study
Coles, Robert. Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work. Boston: Little, Brown,
1970. A fine blend of Erikson’s biography with his major ideas.
__________, ed. The Erik Erikson Reader. New York:W.W. Norton, 2000. A collection
of Erikson’s most influential and accessible writings.
Erikson, Erik H. Childhood and Society. 1950. Reprint. New York: Norton,
1993. A wide-ranging compilation of Erikson’s studies of development,
clinical practice, cross-cultural analyses, and psychohistory. His most accessible
and popular book.
__________. Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence. 1970. Reprint.
New York: Norton, 1993. Erikson’s application of his developmental
theory to the life of Mahatma Gandhi. This book won the Pulitzer
Prize.
__________. Identity and the Life Cycle. 1959. Reprint. New York: Norton,
1980. Erikson’s view of human development, with particular emphasis on
ego identity and its formation in adolescence.
__________. The Life Cycle Completed. Extended version. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1997. Erikson’s final book, examining the life cycle from the
viewpoint of the final stage.
Friedman, Lawrence. Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. A thorough and balanced biography of
Erikson, written by an author who interviewed his subject extensively in
the last years of his life.
Hartmann, Heinz. Essays on Ego Psychology. New York: International Universities
Press, 1964. A collection of Hartmann’s foundational essays on the
autonomy of the ego.
Yankelovich, Daniel, and William Barrett. Ego and Instinct. New York: Vintage,
1971. An original contribution to the dialogue of Freudian psychoanalysis
and ego psychology on the question of human nature.
Christopher M. Aanstoos
See also: Personality Theory; Psychoanalytic Psychology; Psychoanalytic
Psychology and Personality: Sigmund Freud. 323