Word: erikson
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Last week, a petition, submitted with nine signatures, requesting longer hours was denied by Louis E. Martin librarian of Harvard College, and Alan E. Erikson, Cabot librarian...
Freud, Spock and Piaget have charted almost every inch of childhood. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson put the final touches on a convincing map of adolescence. Yet until very recently, most of the charting stopped near the age of 21 -as if adults escape any sequence of further development. Now a growing number of researchers are surveying the adult life cycle...
...REACHING OUT. Following Erik Erikson, who found the dominant feature of the 20s to be a search for personal identity and an ability to develop intimacy, Gould, Levinson and Vaillant see this period as an age of reaching toward others. The growing adult is expansive, devoted to mastering the world; he avoids emotional extremes, rarely bothers to analyze commitments. To Levinson, this is a time for "togetherness" in marriage. It is also a time when a man is likely to acquire a mentor-a patron and supporter some eight to 15 years older...
...make it big" in one's career. Does all this add up to disaster? Not necessarily. "Midlife crisis does not appear to portend decay," says Vaillant. "It often heralds a new stage of man." The way out of this turbulent stage, say the researchers, is through what Erikson calls "generativity"-nurturing, teaching and serving others. The successful mid-lifer emerges ready to be a mentor to a younger...
Like Freud and Erikson, the life-cycle researchers argue that personality disorders arise when, for one reason or another, the orderly march of life stages is disrupted. Vaillant's studies suggest, for instance, that men who fail to achieve an identity in adolescence sometimes sail through life with a happy-go-lucky air, but never achieve intimacy, BOOM or generativity. "They live out their lives like latency boys," he says, not mentally ill, but developmentally retarded at the childhood level...