Life Cycle of a Human - Essay Example

Life Cycle Introduction Life is never simple. Rather than anesthetize every discomfort, it makes sense to face the fear and confusion, feelit, and work through it. The moral life is not so much action as thoughtful action, and the moral fruit of action is not "results" but experience of life. But the introduction of thought into action changes the whole character of the problem. Moral problems are continuing problems, inviting contemplation. The moral results of action are not so much conclusions as new developments of older questions. The moral problem, in short, is the problem of life. Problems of business call for definite answers, to be given at once; the problem of life cannot be thus disposed of. Human life is made to consist of a succession of temporary practical problems, each of them set and once for all given by the outcome of the last and each of them to be solved, or in some form to be disposed of, right away. "Nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality" (Offer, & Sabshin, 1984). One can hardly state the limits of what this may be taken to mean. Such, however, is the attitude of humanism; and at the lowest terms it offers a complete contrast to the attitude of pragmatism. In connection with the pragmatic attitude it was said that the significance of any temporal moment of life, or the meaning of any present desire, might be anything you please; "the present" is a question of the present scope of imagination. The same indefinite possibility confronts us when we think to define the boundaries of human nature. Could we think of the human being simply as an organism with a definite habitat and a restricted span of life, we might then formulate a definite "science of ethics" (Offer, & Sabshin, 1984), based upon human nature as a natural fact, undisturbed by suggestions metaphysical. But such a science of ethics would hardly merit the name of moral philosophy. The "moral nature" of man implies that he is not a mere organism but an organism which is self-conscious and critical, an organism with imagination. To human nature as thus conceived it seems difficult to assign any "natural" boundaries. Despite the uniqueness of each individual and the different ways and varied environments in which we are raised, all of us are endowed with physical make-ups that are essentially alike and with similar biological needs that must be met. In common with all living things our lives go through a cycle of maturation, maturity, decline, and death. In common with all human beings each of us goes through a prolonged period of dependent immaturity, forms intense bonds to those who nurture us, and never becomes free of our need for others; and we mature sexually relatively late as if the evolutionary process took into account our needs to learn how to live and how to raise our offspring (Lidz, 1983). Each of us requires many years to learn adaptive techniques and become an integrated person, and we depend upon a culture and a society to provide our essential environments; we rely upon thought and foresight to find our paths through life and therefore become aware of the passage of time and our changing position in the life cycle. From an early age we know that the years of our lives are numbered; at times we bemoan the fact and at times we are glad of it; but in some way we learn to come to terms with our mortality and the realization that our lives are one-time ventures in a very small segment of time and space. These and many other such similarities make possible the generalizations and abstractions necessary for the scientific study of personality development. The Meaning of Development Many people have always been eager to form theories concerning the phenomena in and around them. They felt that once they had a "theory" concerning events, they could not only understand the event better but eventually control it (Offer, & Sabshin, 1984). When theories were proven wrong, new ones replaced old ones. In our opinion, a theory concerning normal human development has tremendous appeal for the following reasons: First, it helps us make "sense" of our personal lives. We know what to expect in each stage and we will be better prepared for potential crises. Furthermore, it enables us to better understand our children and our parents and to help them when necessary. We will also know when someone deviates from the normal pattern; in other words, we recognize when he or she needs outside, professional help in order to get back on track. We also know when the outside professional help is sufficient and we can continue developing by ourselves. Second, in this best of all possible worlds, theory would be based on knowledge. Knowledge would be the sum part of bits of data. Each of these bits of data would be defined, classified, and, most important, measurable. After all, we can only make reasonable predictions if we can measure the variables on which we have to base our predictions (Offer, & Sabshin, 1984). Obviously we recognize that we are light-years away from predicting the course of development from our theoretical (or empirical) knowledge. There simply are too many variables, and their relationship with each other, as well as with chance occurrences, throws a continuous monkey wrench into our "near" attempt. We cannot confirm or deny our hypothesis, but we can use our empirical data to help us narrow the field of possible theories. Despite the obvious limitations to a current overall theory of development, there are many theories of normal human development. The wish to know ourselves is understandable, but the consequences are often ignored. We believe that we need to weigh the consequences of our beliefs in order to understand our actions better. One of the problems that often surfaces are that after a theory is postulated (often based on personal experiences), there is an immediate need to generalize it to everyone, because "if it fits me, it just must fit her or him too" (Offer, & Sabshin, 1984). Many social and behavioral scientists as well as many others (e.g., moral philosophers, theologians) strongly cling to their own notion of development. It is important to examine, scientifically, whether commonly held folk notions about the developmental relationship between infancy and childhood are correct (Daniel Offer, Melvin Sabshin, 1984). Despair and Disgust vs. Integrity: Wisdom Integrity, we maintain, demands tact, contact, and touch. This is a serious demand on the senses of elders. It takes a lifetime to learn to be tactful and demands both patience and skill; it is all too easy to become weary and discouraged. It is a serious challenge at ninety just to locate misplaced eyeglasses. Ninth stage elders just do not usually have the adequately good eyesight or the receptive ears wisdom demands, although we may rejoice in the progress being made with hearing devices and eye surgery (Erikson, & Erikson, 1997). In encounters between the syntonic and dystonic, the dystonic elements win out as time goes on; despair is "in attendance." Ninth stage despair reflects a somewhat different experience from that affiliated with the eighth stage. Life in the eighth stage includes a retrospective accounting of one's life to date; how much one embraces life as having been well lived, as opposed to regretting missed opportunities, will contribute to the degree of disgust and despair one experiences. As Erik (1997), the author of the famous book "The Life Cycle Completed" has reminded us, Despair expresses the feeling that the time is now short, too short for the attempt to start another life and to try out alternate roads. In one's eighties and nineties one may no longer have the luxury of such retrospective despair. Loss of capacities and disintegration may demand almost all of one's attention. One's focus may become thoroughly circumscribed by concerns of daily functioning so that it is enough just to get through a day intact, however satisfied or dissatisfied one feels about one's previous life history. Of course despair in response to these more immediate and acute events is compounded by earlier self and life evaluations (Erikson, & Erikson, 1997). An elder in his or her eighties or nineties is also apt to have experienced many losses, some of distant relationships and some of more profound and close relationships-parents, partners, and even children. There is much sorrow to cope with plus a clear announcement that death's door is open and not so far away. Should you be living and coping with all these hurdles and losses at ninety or more, you have one firm foothold to depend on. From the beginning we are blessed with basic trust. Without it life is impossible, and with it we have endured. As an enduring strength it has accompanied and bolstered us with hope. Whatever the specific sources of our basic trust may be or have been, and no matter how severely hope has been challenged, it has never abandoned us completely. Life without it is simply unthinkable. If you still are filled with the intensity of being and hope for what may be further grace and enlightenment, then you have reason for living (Erikson, & Erikson, 1997). As Erik has often pointed out, an individual life cycle cannot be adequately understood apart from the social context in which it comes to fruition. Individual and society are intricately woven, dynamically interrelated in continual exchange. Erik (1997) notes: "Lacking a culturally viable ideal of old age, our civilization does not really harbor a concept of the whole of life." As a result, our society does not truly know how to integrate elders into its primary patterns and conventions or into its vital functioning. Rather than be included, aged individuals are often ostracized, neglected, and overlooked; elders are seen no longer as bearers of wisdom but as embodiments of shame. Recognizing that the difficulties of the ninth stage both contribute to and are exacerbated by society's disregard, let us now turn to a more detailed consideration of the interplay between elders and their society (Erikson, & Erikson, 1997). The Phasic Nature of Personality Development and the Life Cycle The development of the personality and the course of the life cycle unfold in phases, not at a steady pace. The process is not like climbing up a hill and down the other side, but more akin to a Himalayan expedition during which camps must be made at varying altitudes, guides found, the terrain explored, skills acquired, rests taken before moving up to the next level, and the descent is also made in stages (Tucker, 1961). Children go through periods of relative quiescence and then undergo another marked change as they move into a new phase of life, which opens new potentialities, provides new areas to explore, and poses new challenges for them to master and requires them to learn new sets of skills and abilities. Thus, when infants learn to crawl and can move toward objects that attract them, a new world opens before them that enables them to channel their ebullient energies in new ways, permits a new zest to become manifest, and opens up opportunities for new learning. But it also alters their mothers' lives and the relationships between mother and child, and they will have to learn to relate differently, expect rewards for different types of performance, and gain greater control of their own behavior before achieving a new relative equilibrium. Whereas their parents had always been delighted with any display of new activities, now they seek to restrain or somehow limit behavior, and a child has difficulty in adjusting to such changed attitudes (Tucker, 1961). Similarly, a child may have settled down into a reasonably stable relationship with family and peers, and found a suitable pace and place in the school world, when the sudden spurt of growth that precedes puberty alters the proportions of the body, almost making it unfamiliar to its owner, and then the surges of sexual feelings aroused by hormonal changes must be managed; and a period of relative calm and security has ended. The phasic nature of the life cycle derives from several interlocking factors. 1. The acquisition of certain abilities must wait upon the maturation of the organism. The infant cannot become a toddler until the nerve tracts that permit voluntary discrete movements of the lower limbs become functional. However, even after maturation permits the acquisition of a new attribute, gaining the skills and knowledge to develop it is a very lengthy procedure, but is amenable to specific training and education. The amount of practice required before children can properly use their hands and learn to measure space three-dimensionally is enormous; but because much of it seems random movement or play, the quantity is rarely appreciated. Adequate mastery of simple skills must precede their incorporation into more complicated activities (Tucker, 1961). 2. The individual's cognitive development plays a significant role in creating phasic shifts. The capacity to assume responsibility for the self and the direction of one's own life depends upon the increasing abilities to think, to communicate, and to know the nature of the world and of the people with whom one lives. The child's cognitive development does not progress at an even pace, for qualitatively different capacities emerge in rather discrete stages. 3. The society, through the child's parents, peers, and the roles it establishes for persons of differing ages, sets expectations that promote shifts in life patterns. At the age of five or six, for example, a child is moved into the role of the schoolchild which includes many new demands as well as new privileges. Becoming a married person involves socially set expectations such as an ability and willingness to rescind areas of independence to care for and consider the needs of a spouse. But, in order for any society to remain viable, the expectations and roles it establishes must be compatible with people's capacities and needs at each period of life (Tucker, 1961). 4. The child gains attribute, capacities, roles, and, particularly, capacities for self-control and self-direction by internalizing parental characteristics. Little children clearly need "surrogate egos" in the form of one or both parents to direct their lives. The internalization of these directive influences also takes place in stages in relationship to children's physical, intellectual, and emotional development and the expectations established for them. 5. The passage of time is, in itself, a determinant of phasic changes, not only because there is a need to move into age-appropriate roles, but also because changes in physical makeup require changed attitudes and self- concepts, as when people reach middle life and realize that their life story is approaching a climax (Tucker, 1961). Adulthood In 1970, Erikson ended his "all too extroverted years" of teaching, writing, and traveling. He was 68 years old, had completed a lifetime of clinical work and writing, and had just retired from his professorship at Harvard. Against the backdrop of the 1960s with its various tensions, Erikson felt a resurgence of concern about humanity's direction and eventual end. He hoped in the fundamental goodness of humans but feared that the species would soon destroy itself. Since 1965, he had written about the dangers of violence in a nuclear age. He now began a period of life fully beyond institutional life. The writing years left to him would be brief, but before he disengaged completely, he inspired one last, large-scale effort, the "Conference on the Adult," sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Through this conference, he hoped to surface new insights about undiscovered adult potentials that he held as essential in light of recent social events. Because his various audiences had largely focused on his eight-stage model of the human life cycle alone, most readers had missed his points about what it means to be developmentally mature. It was time to ask his question bluntly, "What is an adult" Erikson held that there were problems with the exploration of adult development beyond the fact that it had been barely studied. He elaborated on this point and its attendant problems in his invitational memorandum to participants and in the conference sessions themselves. There were six main difficulties, he held, in current concepts about the adult. First, Freud had conceptualized adulthood as a barren terrain for development. In the Western world, this viewpoint had taken root. Using Freud's thought, all one could expect of mentally healthy adults was the comparative absence of overriding childhood "guilt," "fixations," "repressions," and "infantile" drives1. Expectations for adult behavior were also stated in negatives, in terms of what adults "shouldn't do."2 Erikson held that by expressing only what was or should be absent, theorists had missed examining what adults are in their development, as well as what they might yet become. Second, although social scientists and the general public no longer saw children as miniature adults, as had been the case throughout the nineteenth century, theorists now tended to portray adults as completed or "grown up" editions of their prior selves. 3Erikson was on target. It is as though twentieth-century thinkers had reversed prior ideas about size and distention. The previous, now abandoned, image of children as miniature adults had found new form in that of adults as blown-up children. This idea took thinking about adults regressively backward in time to circa 190 b.c., when the term adultus was first used to describe fully engorged and ripened children, as well as crops, seasons, animals, and all else that had "adult-ed." Erikson found such thinking inadequate at best, for completed growth and physical bloating have little to do with mature development or with behavior worth emulating. Third, adult attributes and developmental accomplishments were captured as if they existed on a continuum from childhood. Again, Freud's work had lent its hand. It was as though a giant rubber band stretched between infancy and senescence; developmental traits of adulthood were seen as fixed, albeit immaturely, at the band's beginning point. One might stretch that elastic band out, but it always snapped back, in theorists' minds, to its tight beginnings. Even in the Conference on the Adult, when reading the conference transcripts after its sessions were held, Erikson added a handwritten note to the effect that the participants could not discuss the adult without going back, time after time in their discussions, to the child and to childhood origins. Fourth, just as there was a tendency to consider adult development on a linear continuum with childhood, studies that examined adult development separate from that of children were hampered by chronology dependence. Such studies locked the development of adults to the passing of time and to temporally ordered marker events within the adult time span. Bound to a linear notion, researchers had primarily considered adulthood's beginning and ending points and its changes in a temporal sequence. As a result, meanings, contexts, and differential abilities had been ill examined. Capturing development as a function of time meant that persons' cumulative adult years and various watershed events such as marriage and retirement had become artificial substitutes for qualitative changes in developmental complexity. Changing ways of seeing and interpreting the world and oneself and fresh adult potentials and abilities were missing. Erikson was interested in such attributes, in unearthing qualitative potentials and complexity4. Erikson's fifth point was that a tendency exists to accept only established parameters of adult normalcy. In fact, he held that there were parallels between the way psychoanalysis traced aberrations back to infantile origins and the manner in which so many adults limited contemporary concepts of adult behavior, normalcy, and adjustment to the confines of narrow, and frequently regressive, thought. He held that those in positions of institutional power in particular tended to classify individuals who deviated from the norm- through, for instance, rioting, defecting, or exhibiting mental instability-in terms and clinical labels that often biased thought about what normal might entail in some more expansive definition. 5The idea of "normal" needed greater latitude. Particularly with respect to the Vietnam War, he asked why normal meant compliance with killing in a distant land when everything that young adults believed and valued told them they had to resist. How healthy was adjustment to death, in service to elected, so-called leaders' inabilities to acknowledge the error of the war they had begun With respect to civil rights, could Americans not see that preventing social inclusion of minorities meant paralysis of development for all Adjustments had been required, but to conditions to which no one should be expected to comply. Sixth, Erikson insisted that most individuals, by the time they are adults, prefer their own notions about what it means to be mature and to work within society. As a result, they cast aside and sometimes denigrate other equally valid adult ways of being in the world. To counter this tendency, Erikson sought the explicit "ideals" and "images" of adulthood held by the various fields of inquiry represented at the conference against other modes of adulthood. 6Concerned about what we lose as adults, he prodded participants to consider how adults fit into the institutions that employ them, what adults give up in the process of adjusting themselves to work requirements, and why some kinds of persons are nearly always excluded from gainful work. And he pressed discussions about American adults against ideas established by the nation's founders. How, after all, had America evolved into such a consumer mentality, and why was this mentality both abhorred and emulated by those who imported it for their uses abroad He asked why young people, on returning to America's shores after traveling to other countries, saw their own country as a place that fostered adulthood immaturity. He tied many of these questions to his concepts of prejudice. In his memorandum to conference participants and in the conference sessions themselves, he questioned how adults, as they age, might counter the tendency to become defensive and rigidly protective of their favored images and customs of adult life and work. How might they better entertain, sanction, and integrate other adult images and mores as well Erikson urged his agenda. Framing his principal question, he wondered why some persons seem to display a "shining newness" as adults in the "autonomy" and uniqueness of their "singular personalities," whereas others seem to stagnate and rigidify. 7How do those adults manage to entertain a less simplified and reduced view of the world Early in 1971, Erikson had reviewed data on the middle-aged participants he had studied in their early teens in the 1940s as part of the Child Guidance Study of the University of California. Considering his assessments of them 30 years earlier, he interviewed a select few whose radiance had sparked his interest originally. He was once again impressed with their vitality. It was not just their resistance to psychopathology that interested him but the way they seemed to have re-created th emselves anew throughout the demands of adulthood. In his memorandum to those scholars who would think together at the Conference on the Adult, Erikson emphasized his concern about the absence of any substantial theory that explored adult development, potential, and behavior other than in its continuity with childhood, on the basis of linear events, or in terms of the presence or absence of pathology. The occasion of the conference thus gave him a fresh opportunity to consider adulthood, an agenda that had occupied his work since 1955. The course of any life contains a series of inevitable developmental crises that arise out of the need to meet the new challenges that are inherent in the life cycle. Through surmounting these crises the individual gains new strength, self-sufficiency, and integrity. The avoidance of challenge leads to stagnation. Each person meets each developmental crisis somewhat differently but similarities exist in the ways people meet similar developmental problems, and there is likely to be something repetitive in how the same individual surmounts various crises in life (Tucker, 1961). It may seem strange for an unconsidered moment to conclude this guide to the life cycle with a chapter on death. But death is part of the life cycle, an inevitable outcome of life that brings closure to a life story; and, because humans from early childhood are aware of their ultimate death, it influences their development and their way of life profoundly (Tucker, 1961). Then, physicians-as also nurses and medical social workers-have intimate relationships with death: they confront Death as the immortal antagonist against whom they shield their patient for a time; but when the outcome becomes inevitable, physicians again turn midwife to ease the passage through the gate of life, this time to return patients into the dark womb of oblivion, where they will find surcease from pain and striving (Tucker, 1961). Changing Attitudes toward Death through the Life Cycle Death has a different meaning and impact on a person at different periods of life. Children usually become aware in a meaningful way of death as the end of life at about the age of four or five. Their concerns are clearly an aspect of separation anxiety; and fears that their mothers will die arouse as much concern as their own deaths. It is a fear of being isolated without a protecting and nurturing person and reflects the child's incompletion and the lack of clear boundaries between the self and the mother. It can mount to become a serious problem in the insecure child; perhaps particularly in children whose mothers have left them for a prolonged period in their second or third years. But many children will also puzzle about death, and experience an uncanny feeling in trying to grasp its essence-the beginnings of an "existential" anxiety. Many children find solace or release from such anxieties through belief in a life after death in which they will continue to have their parents (Lidz, 1983). A patient recalled what he believed was a milestone in his maturation. Shortly after his marriage, war had broken out and his native country was attacked; on his way into combat he found himself wishing to believe in a life after death but not, as in childhood, from anxiety, but rather because of his love for his wife and the intensity of his desire to be certain he would again be with her. The interpretation of fears of death and dying as a form of castration anxiety seems, at times, an attempt to handle a pervasive source of concern by changing it into an immature and needless childhood oedipal fear, to consider an ultimate reality by saying, in effect, "Death is no more real than fears that father will castrate you and you are really only suffering from guilt over wishing that your father were dead" (Lidz, 1983). Of course, such wishes are sources of anxiety that one will be castrated or die, but they do not explain why death is feared. Death can also seem like castration when a person is cut down in the prime of life, thereby rendered impotent to carry out strivings and hopes, or to find fulfillment in love. Death is the reaper with a scythe who cuts off life. Death also provides a challenge and a test, particularly to men who must prove to themselves that they can face death and not run or flinch-the essence of bravery. Perhaps persons feel that they must conquer death through flaunting it, or at least through looking straight into its hollow eye sockets before they can feel secure enough to live. With marriage and parenthood, concerns over death transcend the self, even as do concerns in other areas. Parents will be concerned over what will happen to a spouse and their children should they die, and take precautions for the sake of the family as much as for themselves. We also see how, despite self-preservative drives, parents readily give up their lives to save their children. Indeed, anyone with combat experience soon realizes that men will die for their group; and many will seek to preserve their group's good opinion of them at the risk or sacrifice of their lives (Lidz, 1983). Moreover, many men are willing to fight in wars because they consciously or unconsciously believe that preserving a way of life takes precedence over preserving a life. Persons' attitudes toward death usually change as they age. To old persons Death becomes a familiar. They have had much experience with it, have thought a good deal about it, and eventually expect the final visitor and may even await his call. Whether the desire for death can be considered an "instinct" is a moot question. The elderly often tire of life and simply wish to drop out of the circle of the dance. Reference: Erik H. Erikson, Joan M. Erikson, 1997. The Life Cycle Completed. W. W. Norton, pp 112-115. Daniel Offer, Melvin Sabshin, 1984. Normality and the Life Cycle: A Critical Integration. Basic Books. Tucker, R. C. , 1961, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. London & New York: Cambridge University Press. Theodore Lidz, 1983. The Person, His and Her Development throughout the Life Cycle. Basic Books. Read More