Effects of Disability on Psychosocial Development - Assignment Example

To begin with, Erikson accepted Freud’s ideas and agreed with most although Erikson took issue with the idea that one’s personality is a product of the first five years of one’s life. Erikson was much more optimistic about being able to adapt, change, and grow over a lifetime. Erikson attributed much of a person’s development to society and culture and not just nature or nurture for that matter. One could say Erikson believed it took a village to produce a personality while Freud would have said that the village had little effect since a personality is completed and affected by age five.

Erikson criticized Freud for this concept of criminology that is the idea that all mental illness can be traced to early childhood. Erikson did not discount early childhood experiences but thought that negative experiences could be overcome in a social context. In fact, he thought that much of the development over a person’s lifetime took place in a social context. Some of Freud’s ideas that Erikson also accepted were the theories of the id, ego, and superego as well as Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality.

Erikson's theory of ego psychology differs from Freud's in some specific ways. Davis and Clifton (2006) affirm that in general Erikson's theory was more comprehensive than Freud's mainly because it included discussions about a normal person and it expanded the sources of personality generation to include culture and society. However, Davis and Clifton also point out that “[Erikson] did no statistical research to generate his theories, and it is very hard to test his theories in order to validate them” (Davis & Clifton, 2006).

Yet, based on the available literature, many people interested in Erikson’s theories continue to study them and validate and/or invalidate them as the case may be. Erikson gave several specific reasons for disagreeing with Freud’s criminological ideas about personality development not least of which was that according to Carol Hoare (2005) Freud's ideas seemed “reductionistic, negative, and mechanistic,” and came off as products of nineteenth-century Newtonian philosophy that Freud was trying to fit into twentieth-century thought (Hoare, 2005, p. 20). Erikson saw this as backward-looking rather than progression—what he thought was a more positive approach to psychoanalysis.

“The view was ‘backward . downward . and inward’ to instincts and to pathology presumably originating in infancy; thus it held an "implicit fatalism" (Erikson, 1987a, p. 598)” (Hoare, 2005, p. 20). Whereas Freud fancied himself and other psychoanalysts as somewhat like an archeologist digging through layers of material to get to the object of interest, whereas Erikson, who also had an interest in archeology, thought Freud’s method of “excavation” was regressive, too structured, and obsessed with early life and sexuality.

Hoare quotes Erikson as saying, “ man is not organized like an archaeological mound, in layers; as he grows he makes the last part of all future, and every environment, as he once experienced it, part of the present environment" (Hoare, 2005, p. 20). Ironically, Erikson’s epigenetic principle that says humans develop through eight stages in life seems pretty structured too.