THE

Life Cycle
Completed
EXTENDED VERSION
 BY ERIK H. ERIKSON
Childhood and Society (1950, 1963)
Young Man Luther (1958)
Insight and Responsibility (1964)
Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968)
Gandhi’s Truth (1969)
Dimensions of a New Identity (1974)
Life History and the Historical Moment (1975)
Toys and Reasons (1977)
Identity and the Life Cycle (1959, 1980)
The Life Cycle Completed (1982)
Vital Involvement in Old Age (with Joan M. Erikson and
Helen Q. Kivnick) (1986)
A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers
from 1930 to 1980 (edited by Stephen Schlein, Ph.D.) (1987)

EDITED BY ERIK H. ERIKSON

Adulthood (1978)

BY JOAN M. ERIKSON
Legacies: Prometheus-Orpheus-Socrates
The Universal Bead
St. Francis and His Four Ladies
Activity, Recovery, Growth
Wisdom and the Senses
 Contents

Preface to the Extended Version

Preface to the First Edition

1. Introduction: A Historical Note on the “Outerworld”

2. Psychosexuality and the Cycle of Generations
EPIGENESIS AND PREGENITALITY
ORGAN MODES AND POSTURAL AND SOCIAL MODALITIES

3. Major Stages in Psychosocial Development

ABOUT THE TERMS USED—AND THE CHARTS
THE LAST STAGE
THE GENERATIONAL LINK: ADULTHOOD
ADOLESCENCE AND SCHOOL AGE
THE PRESCHOOL YEARS

4. Ego and Ethos: Concluding Notes

EGO DEFENSE AND SOCIAL ADAPTATION
I AND WE
THREEFOLD REALITY
ETHOS AND ETHICS
HISTORICAL RELATIVITY IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC
METHOD

5. The Ninth Stage

6. Old Age and Community

7. Gerotranscendence

References

Copyright
 Preface to the Extended Version

This extended version of The Life Cycle Completed goes beyond the earlier
edition in setting forth the elements of a ninth stage of the life cycle, a stage
not anticipated in the original Eriksonian approach to psychosocial
development. The discussion of this new material calls for some
autobiographical commentary focusing on the eighth stage, which was the
final stage in the original edition of The Life Cycle Completed.
Before embarking on a statement about the eighth stage of the life cycle
as Erik and I have understood and presented it, I would like to share with you
the story of its “promotion” to stage eight.
In the late 1940s we, then living in California, received an invitation to
present a paper on the developmental stages of life at the Midcentury White
House Conference on Children and Youth. The paper we were to contribute
for the conference was “Growth and Crises of the Healthy Personality.”
We went to work with great enthusiasm. Erik had been involved in the
practice of child analysis for a number of years and was in California
because of his work with the Long-range Research Project on Children at the
University of California at Berkeley. I was involved in raising three small
children and running a household. We were sure we knew intimately about
the early stages of development and were daily more aware of the problems
and challenges of mid-life, marriage, and parenting. It is amazing how
informed one can feel in the midst of the demands of such a tangled warp of
undigested relationships.
With a neat plot of squares and carefully selected words, the whole life
cycle could be presented on one sheet of paper. Many of the future
refinements and elaborations were not indicated in any way. Later this chart
was to grow in length and girth and would be woven in dramatic color. I
have always contended that the life cycle chart becomes really meaningful
only when you have observed it as a weaving or, even better, have
undertaken to weave it yourself.
Shortly before the White House conference, Erik was invited to present
the “stages” to a group of psychologists and psychiatrists in Los Angeles.
Such an assignment seemed to offer a good opportunity to discuss and test out
this material. The plan was for us to drive to the nearest train station, where
Erik could catch the Los Angeles train, and then for me to hurry back to home
and the children.
It was a fairly long drive from the Berkeley hills to the train station in
South San Francisco, and we used the time to discuss the chart and its
presentation. We also were delighted to remember that when the great
Shakespeare had written his “Seven Ages of Man,” he had entirely neglected
to include—of all things—the play stage, stage three in our more inclusive
model. What a fascinating paradox! Perhaps it was blindness on his part to
the role of play in the lives of every child and adult. We felt amused and very
wise.
Let me recall for you a few things the illustrious Bard had to say about
the ages of man. The prospect of aging for men was gloomy indeed.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
 In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.
—As You Like It, act 11, Scene 7, 139

Sitting with the life cycle chart on my lap while Erik drove, I began to feel
uneasy. Shakespeare had seven stages, as did we, and he had omitted an
important one. Had we too left one out? In a shocking moment of clarity I
saw what was wrong: “We” were missing, and so were the children and
Erik’s new book Children and Society. The seven chart stages jumped from
“Intimacy” (stage six) to “Old Age” (stage seven). We surely needed another
stage between the sixth and seventh, but time was short. Soon we included a
new seventh stage entitled “Generativity vs. Stagnation,” followed by “Old
Age” with the strengths of wisdom and integrity promoted to the eighth stage.
How difficult it is to recognize and have perspective for just where one
is presently in one’s own life cycle. Today is like yesterday until you sit back
and take stock. Would we recognize old age as it crept up and the days
rushed on? Only very slowly did we begin to learn the particulars of the
eighth stage.

THE EIGHTH STAGE

Having come to terms with generativity in time for the White House
conference, we found much to keep us busy with the growing-up needs of the
children, travel and research grants, and many other pursuits. Although some
energy slowly dissipated, we kept steaming along until old age really began
to make itself felt. Probably we had been sliding downhill for quite some
time, but we didn’t take it seriously, and our friends supported our
unconcern.
When Erik wrote The Life Cycle Completed, his ninth decade had not
yet begun. Although at age eighty we began to acknowledge our elderly
status, I believe we never faced its challenges realistically until we were
close to ninety. Our lives had not been beset with unresolvable difficulties.
At ninety we woke up in foreign territory. Whatever premonitions we may
have encountered earlier and tossed off as odd and even funny, we soon
began to face unavoidable—and certainly not amusing—realities.
As we had passed through the years of generativity, it had never felt as
though the end of the road were here and now. We had still taken years ahead
for granted. At ninety the vistas changed; the view ahead became limited and
unclear. Death’s door, which we always knew was expectable but had taken
in stride, now seemed just down the block.
When Erik was ninety-one, he and I had been married for sixty-four
years. Following hip surgery, he became withdrawn, and he serenely retired.
He was neither depressed nor bewildered but remained consistently
observing and quietly appreciative of his caretakers. We should all be so
wise, gracious, and accepting of old age when it comes our way. I am now
ninety-three years old and have experienced more of the inevitable
complications of slowly growing old. I am not retired, serene, and gracious.
In fact I am eager to finish this revision of the final stage before it is too late
and too demanding an undertaking.
After the publication of The Life Cycle Completed in 1982, Erik reread
it critically, underlining and annotating it unsparingly from cover to cover
with red, black, and blue ink. I checked his own copy, and that only by
chance, shortly before his death, no page is free of his underlining,
exclamation marks, and notes. Only an artist would be so daring and
forthright.
Erik, who was meticulous about his writing, found it necessary to mark
up with criticisms every page of the published book, and I found myself
wondering what he was trying to tell me. In what way did these firm
annotations revise our previous thinking and add to our understanding of the
life cycle.
 My purpose in reviewing the eighth stage of our life cycle chart, and the
strengths attributed to it, is to clarify several meaningful and important
discrepancies, now that Erik and I have “arrived,” so to speak. My comments
are written in the light of both Erik’s statement that a review of “our attempt
to complete the life cycle in our life time seemed indeed appropriate and
justifiable.”* In the early 1940s, when we were searching for the most
accurate words to designate the life cycle virtues, we selected “wisdom” and
“integrity” as the final strengths to come to full maturity in old age. We had
initially considered “hope” because it was mandatory for survival and was
needed for all other strengths. But since hope becomes vital from infancy on,
it clearly does not demand time for its fruition even though it may endure
throughout life. Having named wisdom and integrity as the strengths of old
age, we were now challenged to justify this selection.
“Wisdom” and “integrity” are among those high-sounding words that
have been personified, cast in bronze, carved in stone and wood. When one
considers such virtues or strengths, one is apt to be reminded of imposing
statues created to portray the characteristics that such words imply: sky-
gazing Liberty, who holds a torch; Justice, eyes bound, with a scale in hand;
and omnipresent Faith, Hope, and Charity. We extol them in silence in stone,
plaster, and metal and revere them with high-minded respect.
I believe that the relationship of elders to the words “wisdom” and
“integrity” is entirely askew unless we first understand the earth-bound
strength of these attributes. These virtues have become too exalted and
undefinable. We need to bring them down to actuality. We must wring their
true meaning out of them. Surely, for example, wisdom is not adequately
represented by volumes of thoughtful information, overloaded with facts and
formulas. Definitions provided by a college dictionary (Random House) are
equally inadequate: “Quality or state of being wise; knowledge of what is
true and right coupled with good judgment; scholarly knowledge or learning;
wise sayings or teachings.”
We must dig down to the roots, to the very seed, of “wisdom” and
“integrity.” The Oxford English Dictionary relentlessly boils words down,
offering us old and valid earthbound connections. After six inches of tiny
print we arrive at the word, the mother lodestone or kernel of illustrious
“wisdom.” This small root is vēda “to see, to know.”
 This word vēda takes us back to the ancient, hallowed myths and
mysterious messages of the sacred Sanskrit writings of India, collectively
named the Vedas. The Vedas incorporate the eternal quest for vision
understanding and wisdom. The sris first saw the Vedas; wisdom,
illumination were transmitted by sight.
We take the wonderful gift of sight for granted unless or until it no
longer consistently serves us as we might expect and wish. We can look back
over a long past, and so doing helps us understand our lives and the world
we live in. We look forward, and this looking may be merely wishful thinking
or hopeful dreaming, but without the promising prospect of the future, all
might be dulled with apprehension. In blithe American fashion, however, we
have latched on to a phrase that exemplifies a slangy acceptance of the
ancient wisdom. How smart we are in our ignorance when we casually say,
“Oh, I see. I get it. I understand.” We do, however, have high respect and
appreciation for such words as “enlightenment,” “discernment,” and
“insight,” all related to seeing and vision.
It is so painful for those of us gifted with sight to consider what life
without it would mean that we tend to avoid such speculation. Those not so
endowed probably develop to a high degree their capacities to hear, smell,
taste, and touch. Who knows how enriched they may be by the extension and
clarity of these other senses? Perhaps they think that our overdependence on
sight actually deprives us.
Alert vision orients and integrates us with the earth where we live and
move, find sustenance, and learn how to get along with other people,
animals, and nature. For this the eyes must be wide open and alert. For this
also the ear must be set to take advantage of all signals and understand their
meaning.
Having responded with delight to the root meaning of the word wisdom,
I made a further discovery. Thousands of years ago the word for “ear” and
for “wisdom” in the Sumerian language seems to have been one and the
same. This word was probably “enki,” since the god of wisdom in Sumer
was addressed by this name. “From the Great Above the goddess opened
[set] her ear, her receptor for wisdom, to the Great Below.”* If wisdom is
conveyed through sound as well as sight, then singing, rhythmic gesture, and
dance are included as its conveyors and amplifiers. Sound is powerful;
sound can soothe, enlighten, inform, and stimulate. It challenges us with its
potential, and we are dependent on our aural perception for the development
of wisdom.
Now we can see that wisdom belongs to the world of actuality to which
our senses give us access. So it is with our senses that we understand through
sight and hearing, enriched and supported as they are by scent, taste, and
touch for all animals have these gifts and attributes. These invaluable sources
of information do not necessarily improve in their functioning over time, but
the alert mind will retain the information wisely stored for use as the need
arises. It is also the role of wisdom to guide our investment in sight and
sound and to focus our capacities on what is relevant, enduring, and
nourishing, both for us individually and for the society in which we live.
We have designated a second attribute to elders that is as lofty and
exalted as wisdom and even less understood. Rather than risk the confusion
of identifying its meaning with exalted representations of it as an attribute of
a person immortalized/memorialized in statues, we do well to look again for
its pithiest meaning in the OED.
The long three- or four-inch paragraph of word parts out of which the
word “integrity” grows ends with the surprising root word “tact.” From this
element we derive “contact,” “intact,” “tactile,” “tangible,” “tack,” even
“touch.” It is with our bodies, our senses that we construct edifices, fashion
materials, and respond to the intimations of the holy, the powerful, and the
wise messages of earth and the heavens. It is in actuality that we live and
move and share the earth with one another. Without contact there is no
growth; in fact without contact life is not possible. Independence is a fallacy.
To understand integrity in these terms makes all those mute and
immobilized statues come to life. If we consider integrity merely a noble
ideal to be embroidered on a banner and raised high in appropriate
situations, we would be doing it a grave injustice. Integrity has the function
of promoting contact with the world, with things, and, above all, with people.
It is a tactile and a tangible way to live, not an intangible, virtuous goal to
seek after and achieve. When we say the clause “This person’s work has
integrity,” we offer the highest praise because the work demonstrates its
capacity to hold together. It is sturdy and reliable, not ethereal. It is a
confirmation of sight and sound and skill involving all our senses.
 Integrity is a wonderfully challenging word. It demands no strenuous
deliberation or performance, just everyday management of all major and
minor activities, with all the steadfast attention to detail necessary for a day
well lived. It is all so simple, so direct, and so difficult.
Now that we more fully understand the implications of the term
“integrity,” what does it offer to those at the eighth stage of the life cycle?
For one thing, whereas formerly it shone like a starry virtue in the sky, it now
is a consistently close element in our daily, very earthy life. It stretches our
being into contact with the real, surrounding world: with light, sound, smell,
and in touch with all animate beings. Everybody, everything matters
intensely, more than ever before. Every meeting takes on a special meaning,
offers enrichment, or points in an unexpected and rewarding direction.
As I consider these revised, but much more ancient, meanings of the
words “integrity” and “wisdom,” I am released and relieved of the onerous,
rather vague, responsibility of a long life of strictures on action or stance. To
accept the promise that these new interpretations offer old age is to unfold a
vista of the past that is radiant and exhilarating. Love, devotion, and
friendship bloom; sadness is tender and enriching; the beauty of relationships
is deeply heart-warming. Looking back is engagingly memorable; the present
is natural and full of little pleasures, immense joys, and much laughter.
Whereas initially the words “wisdom” and “integrity” seemed a
burdensome challenge to elders, the same words, now clearly understood,
reinstate their appropriateness. What is demanded is the aliveness and
awareness that it takes to live with tact and vision in all relationships. One
must join in the process of adaptation. With whatever tact and wisdom we
can muster, disabilities must be accepted with lightness and humor. We all
have taken our youthful capacities for granted and enjoyed them hugely. Let
us applaud the performers now with tact and true appreciation. With hearing
and sight we are privileged; keep on looking and listening.
Old age demands that one garner and lean on all previous experience,
maintaining awareness and creativity with a new grace. There is often
something one might call indomitable about many old people. Erik has called
it an “invariable core,” the “existential identity,” that is an integration of past,
present, and future. It transcends the self and underscores the presence of
intergenerational links. It is universal in its acceptance of the human
condition. Part of the human condition is to lack wisdom about ourselves and
our planet. We must become aware of how little we know. Perhaps we could
wisely “become like little children” who are willing to live, love, and learn
openly. What does that imply? Life has been rich. Trust it further like a
trusting child. Relax and try to be unselfconsciously playful. Whenever you
have playmates, play and let it take you with laughter where you haven’t been
for years!
Thus we submit that wisdom and integrity are active, lifelong
developing processes, as are all the strengths included in the life cycle
stages. They are definitely ongoing, should we dare to hope contagious,
unending, perhaps everlasting?
* The Life Cycle Completed, p. 9.
* Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Innana, Queen of Heaven and Earth (New York:
Harper & Row, 1983, pp. 155–56).
 Preface to the First Edition

This monograph is based on an essay that the National Institute of Mental

Health asked me to contribute to their three-volume The Course of Life,
Psychoanalytic Contributions Toward Understanding Personality
Development. There, it is the second of two introductory chapters invited by
the editors, S. I. Greenspan and G. H. Pollock (1980). The first was written
by Anna Freud and occupied exactly ten modest and thoroughly clear pages
—to my fifty. Her introduction carries the title “Child Analysis as the Study
of Mental Growth (Normal and Abnormal)” and begins with the original
child-analytic work done in Vienna, Berlin, and London. A special section
summarizes the function of the Developmental Lines, a conceptual scheme
designed by Anna Freud and the staff of the Hampstead Clinic (A. Freud
1963). These “lines” lead from infantile immaturity to the reliable (and yet
conflictual) categories of behavior expected from the “average adult.” Here
are some examples: “from libidinal dependence to self-reliance”; “from ego
centricity to peer relationships”; “from play to work.” As a concept, this
developmental scheme is, of course, based on the two fundamental theories
of psychoanalysis; namely, that of psychosexual development and of the ego.
My contribution (1980(a)) attempted to outline the “elements” of a
psychoanalytic theory of psychosocial development. I, too, first traced the
gradual inclusion in psychoanalytic thought of what was once called “the
outerworld” back to my last days of psychoanalytic training in Vienna and on
through my first years in this country. Having emphasized the
complementarity of psychosexual and psychosocial approaches and their
relation to the concept of ego, I proceeded to review the corresponding
stages of the life cycle.
 Now to restate at such length what theoretical considerations one has
advanced in a lifetime and in a variety of data-filled contexts may seem to be
an unrewarding task to writer and reader alike. But it was, in fact, the
historical emphasis of the invitation from the NIMH that to me seemed to
suggest it as a valid undertaking: for such an extension of psychoanalytic
theory could have originated only in this country and in a period—the thirties
and forties—when psychoanalysis, against a background of growing world
turbulence, found itself welcomed into medical centers as well as into
intensive interdisciplinary discussion. And such discussions later proved to
be fundamental to the central theme of the Midcentury White House
Conference on Children and Youth to which Joan Erikson and I contributed a
paper, “Growth and Crises of the ‘Healthy Personality’ ” (1950).
So, I decided to republish and, where necessary, to extend what I had
written for the NIMH—and this with only one major change; when it came
(once more!) to a review of the stages of life, I changed the order of my
presentation. Already in the NIMH chapter, I had elected to begin the list of
the psychosocial stages not, as is customary, with childhood, but with
adulthood: the “idea” being that once you have worked out the interweaving
of all the stages you should be able to start with any stage and—meaningfully
—reach any other on the map of stages. And adulthood, after all, is the link
between the individual life cycle and the cycle of generations. In this essay,
however, I go further and begin my account of the stages with the last one,
old age, to see how much sense a re-view of the completed life cycle can
make of its whole course.
Wherever we begin, however, the central role that the stages of life are
playing in our psychosocial theorizing will lead us ever deeper into the
issues of historical relativity. Thus, a look back on this century’s last few
decades makes it clear that old age was “discovered” only in recent years—
and this both for theoretical and historical reasons—for it certainly
demanded some redefinition when an ever-increasing number of old people
were found (and found themselves) to represent a mass of elderlies rather
than an elite of elders. Before that, however, we had come at last to
acknowledge adulthood as a developmental and conflictual phase in its own
right, rather than merely the mature end of all development (i.e., Benedek
1959). Before that (and then only in the sixties, a period of national identity
crisis dramatically reflected in the public behavior of some of our youth), we
had learned to pay full attention to the adolescent identity crisis as central to
the developmental dynamics of the life cycle (Erikson 1959). And as pointed
out, it had not been before the midcentury that the child’s “healthy
personality” and all the infantile stages discovered only in this century really
became the center of systematic national attention.
In reading this essay, then, the reader—in his or her life-historical time
and place—may wish to review our attempt to “complete” the life cycle in
our lifetime. It is hoped that this title sounds just ironic enough not to be taken
as a promise of an all-inclusive accounting of a perfect human life. For it is
intended to confirm only the fact that if one speaks of life as a cycle, one has
already implied some kind of self-completion. But how one elaborates on
this at a given time depends, of course, on the theoretical stage of one’s field
and on the significance that different periods of life then happen to have for
ourselves and for our fellow men. Today, do some of our terms and concepts
seem all too timebound—or agebound? And if changes are suggested by
changing times, can our terms retain their original significance and continue
to contribute to each other’s meaning?
I myself can only restate the terms here as they “occurred” to us in their
then suggestive, but also fairly orderly, complexity: a complexity, however,
that promptly invited lasting misunderstandings. In restating them here I
cannot avoid arousing in some of my readers the repeated suspicion that they
“somewhere” have already read this or that, maybe longish, passage. They
most probably have: for in this summary it has seemed to me here and there
pointless to rephrase what seems already to have been rather fittingly
formulated.
It so happens that my acknowledgments can also be offered in terms of
a sequence of decades. What I have learned from coworkers can best be
noted by listing those research institutions that I had the privilege to be
associated with while practicing psychoanalysis and taking part in its
applications in medical schools. In the 1930s, I was affiliated with the
Harvard Psychological Clinic and the Yale Institute of Human Relations; in
the forties, with the Guidance Study in the Institute of Human Development at
the University of California, Berkeley; and in the fifties, with the residential
Austen Riggs Center in the Berk-shires. Each of these, with its innovative
ways, permitted me to become involved unforgettably in the clinical or
developmental study of given age groups of human beings. In the sixties,
finally, my own undergraduate course on “The Human Life Cycle,” at
Harvard, permitted me to share the developing scheme with a large group of
responsive students intensely interested in life as well as in history.
Some individuals whose support was especially vital over the years are
named in the text. Any attempt to do them (and unnamed others) “justice” in
this context would seem futile.1
As in all my prefaces, I conclude my acknowledgments with my thanks
to Joan Erikson. Our (just mentioned) joint contribution to the Midcentury
White House Conference makes it especially clear that her “editorial”
guidance has always gone way beyond an attempt to make me readable: it has
enlivened the whole imagery of the life cycle reviewed here (J. Erikson
1950, 1976).
1 The work on this essay was in part supported by a grant from the Maurice Falk Medical Fund in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
 1

Introduction

A HISTORICAL NOTE ON THE “OUTERWORLD”

THE TERM AND CONCEPT, “psychosocial,” in a psychoanalytic context,

is obviously meant to complement the dominant theory of psychosexuality. To
chart the beginnings of such an effort I must go back to the time of my training
in Vienna—the period of ascendance of ego psychology—and briefly trace
some changing conceptualizations of the ego’s relation to the social
environment. True, the two basic works on the ego,—Anna Freud’s The Ego
and the Mechanisms of Defence and H. Hartmann’s Ego Psychology and the
Problem of Adaptation—appeared only in 1936 and in 1939, respectively.
But the observations and conclusions on which these two works were based
dominated much of the discussion in the years before the completion of my
training and my migration to the United States in 1933. The defensive and the
adaptive functions of the ego have, in the meantime, become firm facets of
psychoanalytic theory. My purpose in referring back to their origins is to
indicate in what way, to a young worker, the overall theory seemed to be
working toward and yet stopping short of a systematic attention to the ego’s
role in the relationship of individuality and communality.
Most interesting in retrospect and most indicative of the hidden
ideological controversies that mark the advancement of a field was the
original discord between A. Freud’s and Hartmann’s emerging ideas. Anna
Freud herself, in her straightforward way, reports that when she first formally
submitted her conclusions regarding the defensive functions of the ego to the
Vienna Society in 1936, “Hartmann showed himself appreciative on the
whole, but he emphasized the point that to show the ego at war with the id
was not the whole story, that there were many additional problems of ego
growth and ego functioning which needed consideration. My views were
more restricted at the time, and this was news to me which I was not yet
ready to assimilate.” For, she continues, her contribution came “from the side
of the ego’s defensive activity against the drives; Hartmann’s, in a more
revolutionary manner, from the new angle of ego autonomy which until then
had lain outside analytic study” (Loewenstein et al. 1966).
The last three words, as well as the designation “revolutionary,” point
to the question of self-chosen boundaries drawn at various times in the
development of psychoanalytic theory. To appreciate these, we would need
to consider the ideological as well as the scientific implications of every
advance and of every corresponding term in psychoanalytic theory, and,
indeed, in all applications of theories of natural science to man. Freud’s
original position, of course, was drive oriented, and my generation of men
and women trained in Middle Europe will remember that this most
fundamental of all terms, Trieb, in its German usage had a number of nature-
philosophical connotations as an ennobling as well as an upsetting force: this
(for better or for worse) was lost in its translation into either “instinct” or
“drive.” Die suessen Triebe—“the sweet drives,”—the German poet could
say: while stern physiologists could speak of the obligation in all work
worthy of the name of science to find “forces of equal dignity”(Jones 1953)
—equal to those already isolated and quantified in the natural sciences. But
if Freud insisted that “all our provisional ideas in psychology will
presumably some day be based on an organic substructure” (1914), he also
made it clear that he was willing to wait for a truly reliable experimental
substantiation of an all-inclusive and then still admittedly mythical
instinctual energy. Thus we learned that he was opposed to Reich’s
“materialistic” attempts to find measurable traces of libido in the tonus of
some body surfaces.
Freud’s work had begun in the century of Darwin’s search for the
evolutionary origin of the species; and the new humanist ethos demanded that
mankind, once so proud of the consciousness and the moral stature of its
assumed civilized maturity, would have to accept the discovery of its
primary roots in its animal ancestry, in its own primeval prehistory, and in
the infantile stages of ontogeny. All this, at any rate, was once implied in that
terminology of instinctual energy that over the years has come to convey a
certain ritualistic conviction rather than the persistent hope of strict scientific
substantiation. In its time, however, that energetic form of thought opened up
undreamt-of—or was it dreamt-of—insights. The purpose of drawing his line
there, however, was (as the recently published correspondence between
Freud and Jung has again so dramatically illustrated) Freud’s conviction of
the prime necessity to study vigilantly that unconscious and instinctual core
of man which he called the “id” (and thus something akin to an inner
outerworld) and to take no chances with mankind’s tenacious resistance to
insights into its “lower” nature, and its tendency to devitalize such insights by
remythologizing them as “higher.” No wonder, then, that social reality, in
relation to the inner cauldron to be explored, at first occupied something of
an extraterritorial position and, more often than not, was referred to as the
“outer-world” or “external reality.” Thus, our proud ego, which Freud called
a “frontier creature,” “owes service to three masters and is consequently
menaced by three dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id,
and from the severity of the super-ego” (S. Freud 1923).
When first discussing the relationship of the ego to group life, Freud
(1921) discussed those social authors of his time (for example, Le Bon,
McDougal) who elaborated on “artificial” group formations—that is, mobs,
crowds, mere masses, or what Freud calls “primary” and “primitive” groups.
He focused on the “grownup individual’s insertion into a collection of
people which has acquired the characteristic of a psychological group”
(italics mine). Prophetically, he mused on how such groups “allow man to
throw off the repression of his unconscious impulses.” Freud did not, at that
time, ask the fundamental question as to how the individual had ever
acquired what he “possessed outside the primitive group”; namely, “his own
continuity, bis self-consciousness, bis traditions, and bis customs, bis own
particular functions and position.” Freud’s main objective in analyzing
“artificial” groups (such as a church or an army) was to show that such
groups are held together by “love instincts” which have been diverted from
their biological aims to help form social attachments, “though they do not
operate with less energy on that account.” This last assumption must interest
us in the context of psychosocial development: By what lawfulness can “love
be transferred . . . from sexual to social aims”—transferred undiminished?
Anna Freud, in her summary of the ego’s defensive measures, again
relegated the otherwise acknowledged presence of social forces to an
“outside world”: “The ego is victorious when its defensive measures enable
it to restrict the development of anxiety and so to transform the instincts that,
even in difficult circumstances, some measure of gratification is secured,
thereby establishing the most harmonious relations possible between the id,
the super-ego, and the forces of the outside world” (A. Freud 1936). In her
later work, this trend continued in the formulation of the developmental lines
that “in every instance . . . trace the child’s gradual outgrowing of dependent,
irrational, id- and object-determined attitudes to an increasing ego mastery of
his internal and external world“ (A. Freud 1965). In asking, however, “what
singles out individual lines for special promotion in development,” Anna
Freud did suggest that “we have to look to accidental environmental
influences. In the analysis of older children and the reconstruction from adult
analysis we have found these forces embodied in the parents’ personalities,
their actions and ideals, the family atmosphere, the impact of the cultural
setting as a whole.” Here the question remains which of these environmental
influences are more or less “accidental.”
Hartmann, in turn, went all out in suggesting that the human ego, far from
being merely evolution’s defense against the id, had independent roots. He, in
fact, called such classical functions of the human mind as motility,
perception, and memory “ego apparatuses of primary autonomy.” He also
considered all these developing capacities to be in a state of adaptedness to
what he called “an average expectable environment.” As Rapaport put it:
“By means of these concepts [he] laid the foundation for the psychoanalytic
concept and theory of adaptation, and outlined the first generalized theory of
reality relations in psychoanalytic ego psychology” (Rapaport in Erikson
1959). But, Rapaport adds, he “does not provide a specific and differentiated
psychosocial theory.” And, indeed, an “average expectable environment”
seems to postulate only a minimum of those conditions that, one is tempted to
say, may make mere survival possible, but it seems to ignore the enormous
variations and complexities of social life that are the source of individual
and communal vitality—as well as dramatic conflict. In fact, Hartmann’s
writings, too, continued to employ such terms as “acting in regard to reality,”
“action vis-a-vis reality” (1947) and “acting in the outer world” (1956), to
mention only some of the shortest quotable indications as to where, in a
field’s development, the lines may be drawn at a given time.
The mechanistic and physicalistic wording of psychoanalytic theory, as
well as the persistent references to the “outerworld,” came to puzzle me
early in my training, and this especially in view of the general climate of the
clinical seminars,—Anna Freud’s “Kinderseminar” in particular—that were
alive with a new closeness to social as well as inner problems and were thus
animated by a spirit that characterizes the nature of psychoanalytic training at
its best. Freud once wrote to Romain Rolland that “our inborn instincts and
the world around us being what they are, I could not but regard that love as
no less essential for the survival of the human race than such things as
technology” (1926). And we students could, indeed, experience in clinical
discussions a modern form of caritas in the acknowledgement that, in
principle, all human beings are equal in their exposure to the same conflicts
and that the psychoanalytic “technique” demands the psychoanalyst’s insight
into the conflicts he may inescapably (and most instructively) be
“transferring” from his own life to a given therapeutic situation.
These are, at any rate, the concepts and words I would use today to
characterize the core of a new communal spirit that I perceived at times in
my student years. Thus, the extensive, and intensive, presentation and
discussion of cases seemed to be in polar contrast to the terminological
legacy that provided the framework for theoretical discourse. The clinical
and the theoretical language seemed to celebrate two different attitudes
toward human motivation, although they proved complementary to each other
within our training experience.
Furthermore, as the treatment of adults had led to the formulation of
some definite and most fateful substages of childhood, and thus to
developmental assumptions that set an early pattern for the eventual study of
the whole life cycle, the direct psychoanalytic observation and treatment of
children had suggested itself powerfully. In the discussion of such work, the
developmental ethos of psychoanalysis came to manifest itself most clearly,
for as children offered striking symptomatic verifications of the pathographic
assumptions of psychoanalysis, they often did so by outdoing all adult
expectations in their directness of playful and communicative expression.
Thus, they revealed, along with the child’s intense conflicts, a resourceful
and inventive striving for experience and synthesis. It was in the seminars
dealing with child patients and shared by psychoanalysts deeply involved in
“progressive education” that the reductionist language of scientistic theory
moved into the background, while the foreground became vivid with
innumerable details illustrating the patient’s mutual involvement with
significant persons. Here, instead of the single person’s inner “economics” of
drive and defense, an ecology of mutual activation within a communal unit
such as the family suggested itself as a future subject of study. This seemed
particularly true for the observations reported by the two leading observers
of youth, Siegfried Bernfeld and August Aichhorn. The first I learned to know
primarily as a great visiting speaker and the second as the most empathic and
down-to-earth discussant of individual young delinquents.
Today, I would not hesitate to designate the basic difference between
the theoretical and the clinical approaches characterizing our training as that
between last century’s preoccupation with the economics of energy and this
century’s emphasis on complementarity and relativity. Without quite knowing
what I was doing, I later titled the first chapter of my first book “Relevance
and Relativity in the Case History” (1951, 1963). Whatever I said there, and
however analogistic such thinking may be, I have come to consider the basic
clinical attitude of psychoanalysis an experience based on the
acknowledgment of multiple relativities—which I hope will become clear in
this essay.
But there was a third ingredient in the training situation in Vienna that to
me could not be subordinated to either the clinical or theoretical approach: I
mean the pleasure (I can only call it aesthetic) of an open, configurational
attention to the rich interplay of form and meaning, for which, above all,
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was the model. From there it was easily
transferred to the observation of children’s play behavior and permitted
equal attention to what such behavior denied and distorted and to that (often
humorous) artfulness of manifest expression, without which symbolic,
ritualized, and, indeed, ritual patterns of behavior could not be understood—
and without which I, as one then trained more in visual than in verbal
communication, could not have found a “natural” access to such
overwhelming data. (At any rate, one of my first psychoanalytic papers in
Vienna was on children’s picture books [1931], and my first paper in this
country was to be “Configurations in Play” [1937]). I reiterate all this here
because to me these ingredients remain basic for the art-and-science of
psychoanalysis and cannot be replaced for the purpose of “proof” by
experimental and statistical investigations, suggestive and satisfying as they
may be in their own right.
But it is high time that I mention the dominant fact that the historical
period in which we learned to observe such revelations of the inner life was
well on its way to turning into one of the most catastrophic periods in history;
and the ideological division between the “inner-” and the “outerworld” may
well have had deep connotations of a threatening split between the
individualistic enlightenment rooted in Judaeo-Christian civilization and the
totalitarian veneration of the racist state. This fact was about to threaten the
very lives of some of those then engaged in the studies described here. Yet,
their efforts were (as the quoted publication dates show) stubbornly
redoubled, as if a methodical devotion to the timeless pursuits of healing and
enlightenment was now needed all the more desperately.
In the meantime, on this side of the Atlantic even younger
psychoanalysts like myself found that the cautious but definite pointers
toward social inquiry prepared in the development of Viennese ego
psychology could be immediately continued and expanded, as we were
drawn eagerly into interdisciplinary work and shared the pioneer spirit of
new psychoanalytic institutes as well as of new “schools.” At Harvard, there
was a hospitable medical milieu invigorated by upsurging psychiatric social
work. There also Henry A. Murry was studying life histories rather than case
histories; while at a variety of interdisciplinary meetings (under the wide
influence of Lawrence K. Frank, Margaret Mead, and others), the doors
between the different compartments of medical and social study were
unlocked for an exchange of concerns that soon proved complementary. And
so it happened that in the very year when The Ego and the Mechanisms of
Defence (A. Freud 1936) appeared in Vienna, I was privileged to accompany
the anthropologist Scudder Mekeel to the Sioux Indians’ reservation at Pine
Ridge in South Dakota and could make observations that proved basic to a
psychoanalytic, psychosocial theory. One of the most surprising features in
our first conversations with American Indians was the convergence between
the rationale given by the Indians for their ancient methods of childrearing
and the psychoanalytic reasoning by which we would come to consider the
same data relevant and interdependent. Training in such groups, so we soon
concluded, is the method by which a group’s basic ways of organizing
experience (its group ethos, as we came to call it) is transmitted to the
infant’s early bodily experiences and, through them, to the beginnings of his
ego.
The comparative reconstruction of the ancient child-training systems of
this hunting tribe of the Great Plains, and, later, of a California fishing tribe,
threw much light on what Spitz called the “dialogue” between the child’s
developmental readiness and the pattern of maternal care readied for the
child by a community—“the source and origin of species-specific
adaptation” (Spitz 1963, p. 174). We also learned to recognize the
importance of the style of child training not only for the inner economy of the
individual life cycle but also for the ecological balance of a given community
under changing technological and historical conditions.
It was no consolation then, but it provided a certain grim
encouragement, that what we gradually learned of the holocaust and
experienced in World War II at least suggested the future possibility of a
clarification by a new political psychology of the most devastatingly
destructive trends in the seemingly most civilized and advanced
representatives of the human species.
It is the limited concern of this essay to clarify the psychosocial theory
that evolved, especially in regard to its origins in, and its possible
significance for, psychoanalytic theory as a whole. What, to begin with the
beginning, is the function of pregenitality, that great distributor of libidinal
energy, in the healthy as well as the disturbed ecology of the individual life
cycle—and in the cycle of generations? Does pregenitality exist only for
genitality and ego synthesis only for the individual?
What follows is based on a great variety of observations and
experiences, clinical and “applied,” that are related in my publications. For
this time I must, as pointed out, attempt to do without narrative. Moreover,
having said it all (or most) before, I must paraphrase and, here and there,
even quote myself.
At the same time, I would be quite unable to relate such summary
thoughts to those of others who over the decades have expressed similar or
opposing views without, however, claiming to represent a psychosocial point
of view within psychoanalysis. It is such a circumscribed effort that seemed
warranted by the invitation of the NIMH.
 2

Psychosexuality and the Cycle of

Generations

EPIGENESIS AND PREGENITALITY

COMBINED DESIGNATIONS such as “psycho-sexual” and “psychosocial”

are obviously meant to open the borderlines of two fields, each established
in its methodological and ideological realm, for two-way traffic. But such
hyphenated attempts rarely overcome the human tendency to mistake what can
be submitted to established techniques for the true nature of things. Luckily,
healing always calls for a holistic attitude that does not argue with
established facts but, above all, attempts to include them in a wider context
of some enlightening quality. On the basis of case-historical and life-
historical experience, therefore, I can only begin with the assumption that a
human being’s existence depends at every moment on three processes of
organization that must complement each other. There is, in whatever order,
the biological process of the hierarchic organization of organ systems
constituting a body (soma); there is the psychic process organizing individual
experience by ego synthesis (psyche); and there is the communal process of
the cultural organization of the interdependence of persons (ethos).
To begin with, each of these processes has its own specialized methods
of investigation that must, in fact, stay clear of each other in order to isolate
and study certain elements basic to nature and to man. But, in the end, all
three approaches are necessary for the clarification of any intact human
event.
In clinical work, of course, we come face to face with the often much
more striking way in which these processes, by their very nature, are apt to
fail and isolate each other, causing what by different methods can be studied
as somatic tension, individual anxiety, or social panic. What makes clinical
work so instructive, however, is the rule that to approach human behavior in
terms of one of these processes always means to find oneself involved in the
others, for each item that proves relevant in one process is seen to give
significance to, as it receives meaning from, items in the others. One may—
as Freud did in his clinical studies of the neuroses of his time and in
accordance with the dominant scientific concepts of his period—find a
decisively new access to human motivation by assuming an all-powerful
sexual energy (Eros) denied by human consciousness, repressed by the
dominant morality, and ignored by science. And the very magnitude, in his
time, of the repression of sexuality, aggravated as it was by a massive
cultural prohibition, helped to endow the theory of sexual energy first with
shocked alarm and then with a glow of liberation. Yet, any exhaustive case
history, life history, or historical account will lead us to consider the
interplay of this hypothesized energy with energies contributed (or withheld!)
by the other processes. Freud’s own dream reports and case fragments, at any
rate, always contain data pointing to such ecological considerations.
The organismic principle that in our work has proven indispensable for
the somatic grounding of psychosexual and psychosocial development is
epigenesis. This term is borrowed from embryology, and whatever its status
today, in the early days of our work it advanced our understanding of the
relativity governing human phenomena linked with organismic growth.
When Freud recognized infantile sexuality, sexology stood about where
embryology had stood in medieval times. Even as embryology once assumed
that a minute but completely formed “homunculus” was ready in the man’s
semen to be implanted into a woman’s uterus, there to expand and from there
to step into life, sexology before Freud assumed that sexuality emerged and
developed during puberty without any preparatory infantile stages.
Eventually, however, embryology came to understand epigenetic
development, the step-by-step growth of the fetal organs, even as
psychoanalysis discovered the pregenital stages of sexuality. How are the
two kinds of stage development related?
As I now quote what the embryologist has to tell us about the epigenesis
of organ systems, I hope that the reader will “hear” the probability that all
growth and development follow analogous patterns. In the epigenetic
sequence of development each organ has its time of origin—a factor as
important as the locus of origin. If the eye, said Stockard, does not arise at
the appointed time, “it will never be able to express itself fully, since the
moment for the rapid outgrowth of some other part will have arrived”
(1931). But if it has begun to arise at the right time, still another time factor
determines the most critical stage of its development: “A given organ must be
interrupted during the early stage of its development in order to be
completely suppressed or grossly modified” (Stockard 1931). If the organ
misses its time of ascendance, it is not only doomed as an entity, it endangers
at the same time the whole hierarchy of organs. “Not only does the arrest of a
rapidly budding part . . . tend to suppress its development temporarily, but
the premature loss of supremacy to some other organ renders it impossible
for the suppressed part to come again into dominance so that it is
permanently modified.” The result of normal development, however, is
proper relationship of size and function among all body organs: the liver
adjusted in size to the stomach and intestine; the heart and lungs properly
balanced; and the capacity of the vascular system accurately proportioned to
the body as a whole.
Embryology, too, learned much about normal development from the
developmental accidents which cause “monstra in excessu” and “monstra in
defectu,” even as Freud was led to recognize the laws of normal infantile
pregenitality from the clinical observation of the distortion of genitality
either by symptoms of “excessive” perversion or of “defective” repression.
How, after birth, the maturing organism continues to unfold, by growing
planfully and by developing a prescribed sequence of physical, cognitive,
and social capacities—all that is described in the literature of child
development.
To us, it is first all important to realize that in the sequence of
significant experiences the healthy child, if properly guided, can be trusted to
conform to the epigenetic laws of development as they now create a
succession of potentialities for significant interaction with a growing number
of individuals and with the mores that govern them. While such interaction
varies widely from culture to culture, all cultures must guarantee some
essential “proper rate” and “proper sequence,” their propriety corresponding
to what Hartmann (1939) referred to as “average expectable”; that is, what is
necessary and manageable for all humans, no matter how they differ in
personality and cultural pattern.
Epigenesis, then, by no means signifies a mere succession. It also
determines certain laws in the fundamental relations of the growing parts to
each other—as the diagram below attempts to formalize:

The heavily lined boxes along the ascending diagonal demonstrate both a
sequence of stages (I, II, III) and a development of component parts (1, 2, 3);
in other words, the diagram formalizes a progression through time of a
differentiation of parts. This indicates that each part (say, 2I) exists (below
the diagonal) in some form before “its” decisive and critical time normally
arrives (2II) and remains systematically related to all others (1 and 3) so
that the whole ensemble depends on the proper development in the proper
sequence of each item. Finally, as each part comes to its full ascendance and
finds some lasting solution during its stage (on the diagonal) it will also be
expected to develop further (2III) under the dominance of subsequent
ascendancies (3III) and most of all, to take its place in the integration of the
whole ensemble (lIII, 2III, 3III). Let us now see what implications such a
schema may have for pregenitality and (later) for psychosocial development.
Pregenitality is so pervasive a concept in psychoanalytic literature that
it will suffice to summarize here those of its essential features on which a
psychoanalytic theory of development must be based. The child’s erotic
experiences are called pregenital because sexuality reaches genital primacy
only in puberty. In childhood, sexual development undergoes three phases,
each of which marks the strong libidinization of a vital zone of the organism.
Therefore, they are usually referred to as the “oral,” the “anal,” and the
“phallic” phases. The far-reaching consequences of their strong libidinal
endowment for the vicissitudes of human sexuality have been abundantly
demonstrated—that is, the playful variety of pregenital pleasures (if, indeed,
they remain “fore-pleasures”); the ensuing perversions, if one or the other
remains demanding enough to upset the genital primacy; and, above all, the
neurotic consequences of the undue repression of strong pregenital needs.
Obviously, these three stages, too, are linked epigenetically, for anality (2I)
exists during the oral stage (I) and must take its place in the “phallic” stage
(III), after its normative crisis in the anal stage (2II).
Granted all this, the question remains: Does pregenitality, as an intrinsic
part of man’s prolonged childhood, only exist for and borrow significance
from the development of sexuality?
From a psychobiological viewpoint it is most obvious that these
“erotogenic” zones and the stages of their libidinization seem central to a
number of other developments basic to survival. There is, first of all, the
fundamental fact that they serve functions necessary for the preservation of
the organism: the intake of food and the elimination of waste—and, after
some delay called sexual latency, the procreative acts preserving the species.
The sequence of their erotization, furthermore, is intrinsically related to the
contemporaneous growth of other organ systems.
Let us consider here in passing one of the functions of the human hand;
namely, the mediation between autoerotic experiences and their sublimation.
The arms, with all their defensive and aggressive functions, are also
“arranged” so that the hands can serve as the sensitive conveyors of
manipulatory excitement even as they are the dextrous executors of most
complex activities such as are served also by man’s special eye-hand
coordination. All this is of outstanding importance in the play age, to which
we ascribe the psychosocial conflict of initiative vs. guilt—where
guiltiness, of course, rules against habitual autoerotism and the fantasies it
serves, while initiative opens manifold avenues of sublimation in dextrous
play and in basic patterns of work and communication. To begin with, then,
one must throughout relate the erotogenic zones and periods to all the
developing sensory, muscular, and locomotor organ systems, and thus speak
of:
 (1) an oral-respiratory and sensory stage
(2) an anal-urethral and muscular stage
(3) an infantile-genital and locomotor stage

These stages and all their part aspects, in turn, must be visualized in the
epigenetic order charted in the small diagram (page 28). At the same time, it
may prove helpful to the reader to localize these stages in column A on Chart
1, (pages 32–33) which lists a survey of some of the themes gradually to be
related to each other in this essay.
As we now approach the question as to how these organ systems also
“acquire” psychosocial significance, we must first of all remember that the
stages of prolonged human childhood (with all their instinctual variability)
and the structure of human communities (in all their cultural variation) are
part of one evolutionary development and must have a built-in potential for
serving each other. Communal institutions can, in principle, be expected to
support the developmental potentials of the organ systems, even though, at the
same time, they will insist on giving each part function (as well as childhood
as a whole) specific connotations which may support cultural norms,
communal style, and the dominant world view, and yet may also cause
unecological conflict.
But as to the specific question of how the community responds to the
erotic experience and expression associated with each stage of pregenitality,
we face a historical dilemma of interpretation, for the clinical observations
of psychoanalysis that led to the discovery of the stages of pregenitality only
permitted the conclusion that, by its very nature, “society” as such is so
hostile to infantile sexuality that it becomes a matter of more or less strict
repression, amounting, at times, to an all-human suppression. Such potential
repression, however, can be said to have been uniquely monomanic in the
Victorian period of history and specifically pathogenic in creating its prime
neuroses; namely, hysteria and compulsion neurosis. And while psychiatry
and psychoanalysis can and must always discover such “new” aspects of
human nature as are reflected in the epidemiological trends of the times, their
interpretation must, at any given time, allow for what we will discuss later as
historical relativity. Periods not specifically inclined to train children with
excessive moralism do permit, up to a point, a direct playing out of infantile
sexual trends. And all societies must, in principle, cultivate an instinctually
endowed interplay of adults and children by offering special forms of
“dialogue” by which the child’s early physical experiences are given deep
and lasting cultural connotations. As the maternal and the paternal person,
and then various parental persons, come within the radius of the child’s
readiness for instinctual attachment and interplay, the child in turn evokes in
these adults corresponding patterns of communication of long-range
significance for communal as well as individual integration.

Chart
 ORGAN MODES AND POSTURAL AND SOCIAL
MODALITIES

PREGENITAL MODES
We now nominate for the prime link between psychosexual and
psychosocial development the organ modes dominating the psychosexual
zones of the human organism. These organ modes are incorporation,
retention, elimination, intrusion, and inclusion; and while various apertures
can serve a number of modes, the theory of pregenitality maintains that each
of the libidinal zones during “its” stage is dominated both pleasurably and
purposefully by a primary mode-configuration of functioning. The mouth
primarily incorporates, even as it can also eject content or close itself up to
incoming matter. The anus and the urethra retain and eliminate, while the
phallus is destined to intrude, and the vagina to include. But these modes
also comprise basic configurations that dominate the interplay of a
mammalian organism and its parts with another organism and its parts, as
well as with the world of things. The zones and their modes, therefore, are
the focus of some prime concerns of any culture’s child-training systems,
even as they remain, in their further development, central to the culture’s
“way of life.” At the same time, their first experience in childhood is, of
course, significantly related to the postural changes and modalities that are
so basic to an organism destined to be upright—from proneness to crawling;
from sitting and standing to walking and running—with all their resulting
changes in perspective. These include the proper spatial behavior expected
from the two sexes.
On first acquaintance with “primitive” childrearing methods, one cannot
help concluding that there is some instinctive wisdom in the way in which
they use the instinctual forces of pregenitality not only by making the child
sacrifice some strong wishes in a significant way, but also by helping the
child to enjoy as well as to perfect adaptive functions from the most minute
daily habits to the techniques required by the dominant technology. Our
reconstruction of the original Sioux child training made us believe that what
we will later describe and discuss as basic trust in early infancy was first
established by the almost unrestricted attentiveness and generosity of the
nursing mother. While still nursing during the teething stage, she would
playfully aggravate the infant boy’s ready rage in such a way that the greatest
possible degree of latent ferocity was provoked. This was apparently to be
channelized later into customary play and then into work, hunting and warring
demanding competent aggressiveness against prey and enemy. Thus, we
concluded, primitive cultures, beyond giving specific meanings to early
bodily and interpersonal experience in order to create the “right” emphases
on both organ modes and social modalities, appear to channelize carefully
and systematically the energies thus provoked and deflected; and they give
consistent supernatural meaning to the infantile anxieties that they have
exploited by such provocation.
In elaborating on some of the early social modalities related to organ
modes, let me resort to basic English, for its spare verbal usage can best
convey for us those behaviors that are fundamental to all languages and invite
and permit systematic comparison.
The oral-sensory stage is dominated by two modes of incorporation. To
get means at first to receive and to accept what is given; and there is, of
course, a truly fundamental significance in the similarity between the modes
of breathing and those of sucking. The “sucking” mode is the first social
modality learned in life, and is learned in relation to the maternal person, the
“primal other” of first narcissistic mirroring and of loving attachment. Thus,
in getting what is given, and in learning to get somebody to give what is
wished for, the infant also develops the necessary adaptive groundwork to,
some day, get to be a giver. But then, the teeth develop and with them the
pleasure in biting on things, in biting through them, and in biting bits off
them. This more active-incorporative mode, however, also characterizes the
development of other organs. The eyes, first ready to accept impressions as
they come along, are learning to focus, to isolate, and to “grasp” objects from
the vaguer background—and to follow them. Similarly, the ears learn to
discern significant sounds, to localize them, and to guide a searching turn
toward them, even as the arms learn to reach out aimfully and the hands to
grasp firmly. All these modalities are given widely different connotations in
the context of earlier or later weaning and longer or shorter dependence. We
are, then, dealing here not with a simple causal effect of training on
development but, as we promised, with a mutual assimilation of somatic,
mental, and social patterns: an adaptive development that must be guided by
a certain inner logic in cultural patterns (a logic later to be discussed as
ethos) tuned as it must be to the ego’s growing capacity to adaptively
integrate its “apparatuse.”
As to the simple and functional alternative of holding on and letting go,
some cultures—and probably those where possessiveness is central to the
cultural ethos—will tend to underscore the retentive and eliminative modes
normatively dominating the anal-muscular stage and may make a battleground
of these zones. In their further development, such modes as to bold can turn
into a destructive and cruel retaining or restraining, or they can support a
pattern of care, to have and to bold. To let go, likewise, can turn into an
inimical letting loose of destructive forces, or it can become a relaxed “to let
pass” and “to let be.” In the meantime, a sense of defeat (from too many
conflicting double meanings and too little or too much training) can lead to
deep shame and a compulsive doubt whether one will ever be able to feel
that one willed what one did—or did what one willed.
The intrusive mode, dominating much of the behavior of the third stage,
the infantile-genital, characterizes a variety of configurationally “similar”
activities: the intrusion into space by vigorous locomotion; into other bodies
by physical attack; into other people’s ears and minds by aggressive sounds;
and into the unknown by consuming curiosity. Correspondingly, the inclusive
mode may express itself in the often surprising alteration of such aggressive
behavior with a quiet, if eager, receptivity in regard to imaginative material
and a readiness to form tender and protective relations with peers as well as
with smaller children. True, the first libidinization of penis and vagina can be
manifested in autoerotic play and in oedipal fantasies, although where
conditions permit they can also be dramatized in joint sexual play, including
a mimicry of adult intercourse. But all this will soon give way to “latency,”
while the ambulatory and infantile-genital stage adds to the inventory of
generalized modalities that lend themselves to basic English that of
“making,” in the sense of “being on the make.” The word suggests initiative,
insistence on goal, pleasure of conquest. Again, some cultures are apt to
cultivate in the boy a greater emphasis on “making” by intrusive modes and
in the girl a “making” by teasing and provoking or by other forms of
“catching”; that is, by making herself attractive and endearing. And yet, both
sexes have a combination of all these modalities at their disposal.
 Here, a word should be said concerning the fact that, instead of the
original “phallic phase,” I prefer to speak of an infantile-genital stage, and
to consider it dominated in both sexes by combinations of intrusive and
inclusive modes and modalities. For at the infantile-genital level—and this
seems to be one of the (evolutionary) “reasons” for the latency period—a
certain bisexual disposition must be assumed in both sexes, while a full
differentiation of the genital modes of male intrusion and female inclusion
must wait for puberty. True, the girl’s observation of the boy’s visible and
erectible organ may, especially in patriarchal settings, lead to some penis
envy, but it will also and more simply introduce the strong wish to eventually
include the penis where it seems to want to visit. The very fact, however, that
we are speaking not only of organ modes but also of social modalities of
intrusion and inclusion as developmentally essential for both boys and girls
demands a shift of theoretical emphasis in regard to female development: (1)
from the exclusive sense of loss of an external organ to a budding sense of
vital inner potential—the “inner space,” then—that is by no means at odds
with a full expression of vigorous intrusiveness in locomotion and in general
patterns of initiative; and (2) from a “passive” renunciation of male activity
to the playful pursuit of activities consonant with and expressive of the
possession of birth-giving and nurturant organs. Thus, a certain bisexual
propensity for the alternate use of both the intrusive and the inclusive modes
allows for greater cultural and personal variation in the display of gender
differences, while not foreclosing a full genital differentiation in puberty.
The alternation between the inclusive and intrusive modes does, of
course, lead to specific conflicts in male childhood. It is true that at this age
of great physical concerns, the observation of the female genitals is apt to
arouse in boys a castration fear, which may inhibit identifications with
female persons. And yet, when permitted expression under enlightened
conditions, such identifications can foster the development in boys of caring
qualities not incommensurate with vigorous locomotion and eventually
intrusive genitality.
A full consideration of the final fate of the genital zones, modes, and
modalities must help to clarify certain universal feminine and masculine
problems that may have to be understood in their developmental complexity
before the now so obvious traditional exploitability of sexual differences
becomes fully understandable. There is an undeniable affinity between
inclusive and incorporative modes. In the female, given the absence of a
phallic potential for intrusion (and a postponement of breast development),
this affinity can aggravate under given cultural conditions a tendency toward
taking refuge in dependence. This, in turn, can lead to a collusion with the
exploitative trends of some cultures, and especially so in connection with the
dependent conditions resulting from exclusive and unlimited procreative
responsibilities. At least in some cultural schemes, and together with a
radical division of the economic function of the two sexes, this tendency may,
in human evolution, have contributed to a certain exploitability of the female
as one who expects, as she is expected, to remain dependent even while, or
especially when, taking effective care of infantile (and adult) dependents.2 In
the male, on the other hand, any corresponding need for regressive
dependence or, in fact, a nurturant identification with the mother could, under
the same cultural conditions, well lead to a militant overcompensation in the
direction of intrusive pursuits, such as hunting or warring, competing—or
exploiting. What becomes, in either sex, of the countermodes, therefore,
deserves comparative study, and this most vigilantly at a time when all
theoretical conclusions in such matters are drawn into an acute ideological
discord. The main point is that the social experiments of today and the
available insights must eventually lead to a sexual ethos convincing enough
to children of both sexes as well as to liberated adults.

POSTURAL MODALITIES
As we review the fate of the organ modes of the erogenous zones and
relate them to the modalities of social existence, it becomes important to
point more systematically to the psychosocial significance of the sensory,
muscular, and locomotor modalities during the very period of pregenitality.
The child undergoing these states exists, as we have noted in passing, in an
expanding space-time experience as well as in an expanding radius of
significant social interplay.
Psychoanalytic theory has not made much of the difference between the
changing conditions of being supine or crawling or upright and walking
during the stages of psychosexuality, even though the very riddle posed to
Oedipus pronounces their fundamental importance: “What walks on four feet
in the morning, in midday on two, and on three in the evening?” Let me, then,
begin once more with earliest posture and attempt to illustrate the way in
which it determines (in consonance with the psycho-sexual and psychosocial
stages) some basic perspectives in space-time existence.
The newborn, recumbent, is gradually looking up and searching the
inclined and responsive face of the motherly person. Psychopathology
teaches that this developing eye-to-eye relationship (J. Erikson, 1966) is a
“dialogue” as essential for the psychic development and, indeed, survival of
the whole human being as is the mouth-to-breast one for its sustenance: the
most radical inability to “get in touch” with the maternal world first
betraying itself in the lack of eye-to-eye encounter. But where such contact is
established, the human being will thereafter always look for somebody to
look up to and all through life will feel confirmed by “uplifting” encounters.
Thus, in the playful, and yet planful, dialogue that negotiates the first
interpersonal encounters, the light of the eyes, the features of the face, and the
sound of the name become essential ingredients of a first recognition of and
by the primal other. Their lasting existential value is attested to by the way in
which these ingredients are said to return in decisive encounters throughout
life, be it in that of lovers who “drink to me only with thine eyes”; or in that
enchantment of the masses, which (as in the Indian “darshan”)“drink in” the
presence of a charismatic figure; or in the lasting search for a divine
countenance—as in St. Paul’s promise that we shall penetrate the “glass
darkly” and shall “know even as we also are known.” Modern accounts of
the reported experience of individuals who seem to have returned from a
certified death appear to confirm the vision of such an ultimate meeting.
As we enlarge here on the significance of man’s initial proneness, we
cannot omit mention of the ingenious arrangement of the basic psychoanalytic
treatment situation that, paradoxically, permits free association under the
condition that the patient maintain a supine position which forbids a meeting
of the eyes during a most fateful exchange of words. Such mixture of freedom
and constriction, is indeed, bound to lead to passionate and persistent
transferences, the most profound (and, to some, disturbing) of which may
well be a repetition of the supine infant’s (deprived) search for the
caretaking person’s responsive face.
Human development is dominated by dramatic shifts in emphasis; and
while at first confirmed in its singularly long infantile dependence, the human
child soon and with a vengeance must learn to “stand on its own (two!) feet,”
acquiring a firmness of upright position that creates new perspectives with a
number of decisive meanings, as homo ludens also becomes homo erectus.
For the creature who stands upright, the (at first a bit wobbly) head is
on top, the eyes in front. Our stereoscopic vision thus makes us “face” what
is ahead and in front. What is behind is also in back; and there are other
significant combinations: ahead and above; ahead and below; behind and
above; and behind and below; all of which receive in different languages
strong and varied connotations. What is ahead and above can guide me like a
light, and what is below and in front can trip me up, like a snake. Who or
what is in the back is not visible, although it can see me; wherefore shame is
related not only to the consciousness of being exposed in front, when upright,
but also of having a back—and especially a “behind.” Those who are
“behind me” thus fall into such contradictory categories as those who are
“backing me up” and guiding me in going ahead; or those who are watching
me when I do not know it, and those who are “after me,” trying to “get me.”
Below and behind are those things and people whom I simply may have
outgrown, or those that I want to leave behind, forget, discard. Here, the
eliminative mode can be seen to assume a generalized ejective modality, and
there are, of course, very many other systematic and significant combinations
of organ modes and postural perspectives, which I must leave the reader to
pursue. In the meantime, the reader may have noticed (as I just did) that in
this paragraph I have written in terms of an experiencing “I.” And, indeed,
every step in development which is receiving experiential and linguistic
confirmation also validates not only the (unconscious) ego but also the
conscious “I” as the steady center of self-awareness—a combination as
central to our psychic life as is our breathing to our somatic existence.
In regard to all of this, the postural (as well as modal) logic of language
is one of the prime guarantors to the growing child that “his individual way
of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group
identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.” We shall return to
this.
A child, finally, who has just achieved the ability to walk seems not
only driven to repeat and to perfect the act of walking with a flair of
drivenness and an air of mastery, but will also soon be inclined, in line with
the intrusiveness of the infantile-genital stage, to a variety of invasions into
the sphere of others. Thus, in all cultures, the child becomes aware of the
new status and stature of “one who can walk,” with all its often contradictory
connotations: be it “he who will go far,” or “he who might go too far,” or
“she who moves nicely,” or “she who might tend to ‘run around.’ ” Thus,
walking, as any other developmental achievement, must contribute to a self-
esteem that reflects the conviction that one is learning competent steps
toward some shared and productive future and acquiring a psychosocial
identity on the way.
As to the child’s emerging inner structure, which must be related and
remain related to the cultural “outerworld,” psychoanalysis has emphasized
the ways in which, during childhood, the parents’ prohibitions and
prescriptions are internalized to become part of the superego; that is, an
inner, higher-than-thou voice that makes you “mind”; or an ego ideal that
makes you anxiously or proudly look up to your higher self and helps you
later to find and trust mentors and “great” leaders.

RITUALIZATION
What so far has been called rather vaguely a “dialogue” or interplay
between the growing child and caring adults takes on more psychosocial
presence when we describe one of its most significant characteristics,
namely, ritualization. This term is taken over from ethology, the study of
animal behavior. It was coined by Julian Huxley (1966) for certain
phylogenetically performed “ceremonial” acts in the so-called social
animals, such as the flamboyant greeting ceremonies of some birds. But here
we must take note that the words “ceremonies” and “ceremonial” in this
context make sense only in quotation marks—as does the word “ritual,” say,
when used as a clinical characterization of a handwashing compulsion. Our
term ritualization, luckily, is less pretentious, and in a human context is used
only for a certain kind of informal and yet prescribed interplay between
persons who repeat it at meaningful intervals and in recurring contexts.
While such interplay may not mean much more (at least to the participants)
then “this is the way we do things,” it has, we claim, adaptive value for all
participants and for their group living. For it furthers and guides, from the
beginning of existence, that stage-wise instinctual investment in the social
process that must do for human adaptation what the instinctive fit into a
section of nature will do for an animal species.
To choose an everyday analogy to the animal ritualizations described so
vividly by J. Huxley and K. Lorenz (1966), we call to mind the human
mother’s approach to greeting her infant on awakening or, indeed, the ways in
which the same mother feeds or cleans her infant or puts the infant to sleep. It
becomes clear, then, that what we call ritualization in the human context can,
at the same time, be highly individual (“typical” for the particular mother and
tuned to the particular infant) and yet also, to any outside observer, seem
recognizably stereotyped along some traditional lines subject to
anthropological comparison. The whole procedure is superimposed on the
periodicity of physical and libidinal needs as it responds to the child’s
growing cognitive capacities and the eagerness to have disparate experiences
made coherent by mothering. The mother in her postpartum state is also
needful in a complex manner; for whatever instinctual gratification she may
seek in being a mother, she also needs to become a mother of a special kind
and in a special way. This first human ritualization, then, while fulfilling a
series of uses and duties, supports that joint need, already discussed, for a
mutuality of recognition, by face and by name. And here, while we are
always inclined to pair an infant with its mother, we must of course allow for
other maternal persons and, indeed, for fathers, who help to evoke and to
strengthen in the infant the sense of a primal Other—the I’s counterpart.
Wherever and whenever this element is repeated, such meetings at their
best reconcile seeming paradoxes: they are playful and yet formalized; they
become familiar through repetition and yet seem always surprising. Needless
to say, such matters, while they can be as simple as they seem “natural,” are
not altogether deliberate and (like the best things in life) cannot be contrived.
And yet, they serve the permanent establishment of what in daily usage has
(unfortunately) come to be called the “object” relationship—unfortunately,
because here a term technically meaningful for insiders as part of the libido
theory (for the loved person is an “object” of the libido) is generalized with
possibly “unavowed” consequences (Erikson 1978). The most passionately
loved person is called an “object,” and this misnomer takes the word object
away from the world of factual things: the world in which the child must
also invest uniquely important emotional as well as cognitive interests. At
any rate, the psychosexual aspect of the matter is complemented by the
psychosocial capacity to confront the existence of a primary Other as well as
to comprehend one-self as a separate self—in the light of the other. At the
same time, it counteracts the infant’s rage and anxiety, which seem to be so
much more complex and fateful than the young animal’s upsets and fears.
Correspondingly, a lack of such early connection can, in extreme cases,
reveal an “autism” on the part of the child that corresponds or probably is
responded to by some maternal withdrawal. If so, we can sometimes observe
a fruitless exchange, a kind of private ritualism characterized by a lack of eye
contact and facial responsiveness and, in the child, an endless and hopeless
repetition of stereotyped gestures.
I must now admit that one additional justification for applying the terms
ritualization and ritualisms to such phenomena is, in fact, a correspondence
between everyday ritualizations and the grand rituals of the culture in which
they take place. I suggested earlier that the mutual recognition between
mother and infant may be a model of some of the most exalted encounters
throughout life. This, in fact, may now serve to make it plausible that the
ritualizations of each of the major stages of life correspond to one of the
major institutions in the structure of societies—and to their rituals. I submit
that this first and dimmest affirmation of the described polarity of “I” and
“Other” is basic to a human being’s ritual and esthetic needs for a pervasive
quality which we call the numinous: the aura of a hallowed presence. The
numinous assures us, ever again, of separateness transcended and yet also
of distinctiveness confirmed, and thus of the very basis of a sense of “I.”
Religion and art are the institutions with the strongest traditional claim on the
cultivation of numinosity, as can be discerned in the details of rituals by
which the numinous is shared with a congregation of other “I” ’s—all now
sharing one all-embracing “I Am (Jehovah)” (Erikson 1981). Monarchies
have competed with this claim, and in modern times, of course, political
ideologies have taken over the numinous function, with the face of the leader
multiplied on a thousand banners. But it is too easy for skeptical observers
(including clinicians who, besides a powerful technique, partake in a
professional “movement,” with a founder’s picture on the wall and a heroic
prehistory as ideological guide) to consider traditional needs for such
inclusive and transcendant experiences a partial regression to what appear to
be infantile needs—or forms of mass psychosis. Such needs must be studied
in all their developmental and historical relativity.
 It is true, however, that every basic ritualization is also related to a form
of ritualism, as we call ritual-like behavior patterns marked by stereotyped
repetition and illusory pretenses that obliterate the integrative value of
communal organization. Thus, the need for the numinous under given
conditions easily degenerates into idolatry, a visual form of addiction that,
indeed, can become a most dangerous collective delusional system.
To characterize (more briefly) the primary ritualizations of the second
(anal-muscular), and third (infantile genital-locomotor) stages: In the
second stage the question arises as to how the willful pleasure adhering to
the functions of the muscular system (including the sphincters) can be guided
into behavior patterns fitting the cultural mores, and this by an adult will that
must become the child’s own will. In the ritualizations of infancy, cautions
and avoidances were the parents’ responsibility; now the child himself must
be trained to “watch himself” in regard to what is possible and/or
permissible and what is not. To this end, parents and other elders compare
him (to his face) to what he might become if he (and they) did not watch out,
thus creating two opposite self-images: one which characterizes a person on
the way toward the kind of expansion and self-assertion desired in his home
and in his culture; and one (most fateful) negative image of what one is not
supposed to be (or show) and yet what one potentially is. These images may
be reinforced by unceasing references to the kind of behavior for which the
child is as yet too small, or just the right age, or already too big. All this
takes place within a radius of significant attachments which now include both
older children and parental persons, with the father figure being seen as more
and more central. Maybe it is up to the muscular authority figure with the
deeper voice to underscore the Yes’s and No’s and yet to balance the
threatening and forbidding aspects of his appearance with a benevolent and
guiding guardianship.
Clinically, we know the pathological results of a decisive disturbance at
this stage. It is again a failure of the ritualizations that define the small
individual’s leeway in such a manner that some basic choices remain
guaranteed even as certain areas of self-will are surrendered. And so, the
ritualized acceptance of the necessity to differentiate between right and
wrong, good and bad, mine and thine, may degenerate either into an overly
compulsive compliance or, indeed, into a compulsive impulsivity. The
elders, in turn, demonstrate their inability to carry through productive
ritualization by indulging in compulsive or impulsive, and often most cruel,
ritualisms themselves.
This stage is the arena for the establishment of another great principle of
ritualization. I call it the judicious one, for it combines “the law” and “the
word”: to become ready to accept the spirit of the word that conveys
lawfulness is an important aspect of this development. Here, then, is the
ontogenetic origin of that great human preoccupation with questions of free
will and of self-determination, as well as of the lawful definition of guilt and
transgression. Correspondingly, the institutions rooted in this phase of life
are those that define by law the individual’s freedom of action. The
corresponding rituals are to be found in the judicial system, which makes all-
visible on the public stage of the courts a drama that is familiar to each
individual’s inner life: for the law, we must be made to believe, is untiringly
watchful, as is, alas, our conscience; and both must declare us free as they
condemn the guilty. Thus, the judicious element is another intrinsic element of
man’s psychosocial adaptation, as rooted in ontogenetic development. But the
danger of ritualism lurks here, too. It is legalism, which—now too lenient
and now too strict—is the bureaucratic counterpart to individual
compulsivity.
The play age, finally, is a good stage with which to close the
description of the ritualizations of preschool life. Psychosexually speaking,
the play age must resolve the oedipal triad governing the basic family, while
intensive extrafamilial attachments are postponed to a time after the child has
passed the school age, whatever the society’s method of first schooling may
be. In the meantime, the play age entrusts the vastly increased sphere of
initiative to the capacity of children to cultivate their own sphere of
ritualization; namely, the world of miniature toys and the shared space-time
of games. These are apt to absorb in imaginative interplay both excessive
dreams of conquest and the resulting guilt.
The basic element of ritualization contributed by the play age is the
infantile form of the dramatic. The epigenetic chart, however, will insist that
the dramatic does not replace but rather joins the numinous and the judicial
elements, even as it anticipates the elements as yet to be traced
ontogenetically; namely, the formal and the ideological. No adult ritual, rite,
or ceremony can dispense with any of these. The institutions corresponding
to the child’s play sphere, however, are the stage-or-screen, which
specializes in the awe-filled or humorous expression of the dramatic, or
other circumscribed arenas (the forum, the temple, the court, the common) in
which dramatic events are displayed. As for the element of ritualism rooted
in the play age, I think it is a moralistic and inhibitive suppression of playful
initiative in the absence of creatively ritualized ways of channeling guilt.
Moralism is the word for it.
Having arrived at the connection between play and drama it seems
appropriate to say a word about the psychosocial significance of the infantile
fate of King Oedipus who was, of course, the hero of a play. In charting some
aspects of the organismic order, we have so far neglected the increasing
number of counter-players with whom the growing child (via the zones, the
modes, and the modalities) can enter into meaningful interplay. First there is,
of course, the maternal person who in the stage of symbiosis permits the
libido to be attached to the primal other3 who, as we saw, also becomes the
guarantor of a kind of self-love (for which Narcissus seems, indeed, to be a
somewhat special case) and thus provides that basic trust which we will
presently discuss as the most fundamental syntonic attitude.
It is when this original dyad develops into a triad including the father(s)
that the “conflictuous” conditions for the Oedipus complex are given; that is,
a strong instinctual wish to possess the parent of the other sex forever and the
consequent jealous hate of the (also loved) parent of the same sex. The
psychosexual aspects of this early attachment have made up the very core
complex of psychoanalysis. Here we must add, however, that these
passionate wishes are carefully scheduled to be at their height when the
somatic chances for their consumption are totally lacking while playful
imagination is flourishing. Thus prime instinctual wishes as well as the
corresponding reactions of guilt are scheduled to appear at a period of
development that combines the most intense infantile conflict with the
greatest advance in playfulness, while whatever fantastic wishes—and guilt
feelings—come to flourish are scheduled to be submerged in the next
“latency” and school stage. With the advent, in turn, of genital maturation in
adolescence and its eventual direction toward sexual mates, the remnants of
infantile fantasies of oedipal conquest and competition are linked with those
of age mates who share idealized heroes and leaders (governing concrete
areas and arenas as well as “theaters” and worlds). All these are endowed
with instinctual energies on which the social order must count for its
generational renewal.
In passing, however, we must note another essential attribute of all
developmental unfolding. As the radius of counterplayers increases,
graduating the growing being into ever new roles within wider group
formations, certain basic configurations such as the original dyad or triad
demand to find a new representation within later contexts. This does not give
us the right, without very special proof, to consider such reincarnations as a
mere sign of fixation or regression to the earliest symbiosis. They may well
be instead an epigenetic recapitulation on a higher developmental level and,
possibly, attuned to that level’s governing principles and psychosocial
needs. A charismatic or divine image, in the context of the ideological search
of adolescence or the generative communality of adulthood, is not “nothing
but” a reminder of the first “Other.” As Blos (1967) has called it, there can
be “regression in the service of development.”
I conclude this chapter on the generational implications of epigenetic
development with some summary remarks on play. The original play theory
of psychoanalysis was, in accord with its energy concepts, the “cathartic”
theory, according to which play had the function in childhood of working off
pent-up emotions and finding imaginary relief for past frustrations. Another
plausible explanation was that the child utilized the increasing mastery over
toys for playful arrangements that permitted the illusion of also mastering
some pressing life predicaments. For Freud, play, above all, turned enforced
passivity into imaginary activity. In accord with the developmental
viewpoint, I at one time postulated an autosphere for play with the
sensations of the body; a microsphere for toys; and a macrosphere for play
with others. Of great help in clinical play was the observation that the
microsphere of toys can seduce the child into an unguarded expression of
dangerous wishes and themes that then arouse anxiety and lead to—most
revealing—sudden play disruption, the counterpart in waking life of the
anxiety dream. And indeed, if thus frightened or disappointed in the
microsphere, the child may regress into the autosphere, daydreaming,
thumbsucking, masturbating. Developmentally, however, playfulness reaches
into the macrosphere, that is the social arena shared with others, where it
must be learned which playful intentions can be shared with others—and
forced upon them. Here, soon, the great human invention of formal games,
combining aggressive aims with rules of fairness, takes over. Play, then, is a
good example of the way in which every major trend of epigenetic
development continues to expand and develop throughout life. For the
ritualizing power of play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal
with experience by creating model situations and to master reality by
experiment and planning. It is in crucial phases of his work that the adult, too,
“plays” with past experience and anticipated tasks, beginning with that
activity in the autosphere called thinking. But beyond this, in constructing
model situations not only in open dramatizations (as in “plays” and in fiction)
but also in the laboratory and on the drawing board, we inventively
anticipate the future from the vantage point of a corrected and shared past as
we redeem our failures and strengthen our hopes. In doing so, we obviously
must learn to accept and make do with those materials—be they toys or
thought patterns, natural materials or invented techniques—that are put at our
disposal by the cultural, scientific, and technological conditions of our
moment of history.
And so, epigenesis strongly suggests that we do not make play and work
mutually exclusive. There is an early form of serious work in the earliest
play, while some mature element of play does not hinder, but augments true
seriousness in work. But then, adults have the power to use playfulness and
planfulness for most destructive purposes; play can become a gamble on a
gigantic scale, and to play one’s own game can mean to play havoc with that
of others.
All the themes of the Play Age, however—of initiative inhibited by
guilt; of fantasies materialized in toy things; of play space psychosocially
shared; and of the saga of Oedipus—all these themes remind us of that other,
that most private stage-and-screen: the dream. From its verbalization and
analysis we have learned immeasurably, and yet we must bypass it in this
psychosocial account: except to point out that the dream, so far studied
primarily in regard to its “latent” hidden content, can be very instructive in
its “manifest” use of modes and modalities (Erikson 1977).
Having now sketched the succession up through childhood, of such
basic elements of psychosocial development as modes and modalities,
ritualization and play, I must return once more to the psychosexual theory,
which ascribes such specific contributions of instinctual energy to the child’s
pregenital development.
 The theory of psychosexuality depicts as the goal of pregenital
development the mutuality of genital potency of the two sexes. It makes much
of adult maturation, and most of adult freedom from neurosis, dependent on
this accomplishment. Whatever this libido “is,” however, its transformations
into psychosocial development could, as we have seen, not be effected
without the adults’ devoted, and at times passionate or driven, interaction
with the generational challenge. Therefore, the logic of a truly complete
psychosexual theory may well demand that some instinctual drive toward
procreation and a generative interplay with offspring be assumed to exist in
human nature as a counterpart to the adult animal’s instinctive involvement in
the creation and care of offspring (Benedek 19S9). Thus, as we complete
column A of Chart 1, we add (in parenthesis) a procreative stage that
represents the instinctual aspect of the psychosocial stage of generativity
(column B).
When I postulated this in an address presented to the International
Psychoanalytic Congress in New York in 1979 (Erikson 1980c), I illustrated
the universality of the theme by pointing out that in the classical form of
Oedipus Rex, the king is by no means accused only of a genital crime.
Oedipus is said throughout to have “ploughed the field where he himself was
sown” (Knox 1957); and as a result, all the land had turned barren and the
women infertile.
However, to underline the procreative aspect of psychosexuality may, I
admitted, appear highly paradoxical (if not unethical) at a time when birth
control must become universal. Still, it is and will be the task of
psychoanalysis to point to the possible dangers of radical changes in
psychosexual ecology (as was, in fact, its original mission in the Victorian
age), so that their effects may be recognized in clinical work—and beyond.
And it could well be, for example, that some exaggerated concern with the
“Self,” as observed in today’s patients, may be ascribed in some to a
repression of the wish for procreation and the denial of the resulting sense of
loss. But there is, of course, always an alternative to pathogenic suppression,
namely, sublimation; that is, the use of libidinal forces in psychosocial
contexts. Consider only the increased capacity of some contemporary adults
to “care” for children not “biologically” their own, whether in their homes,
their schools, or, indeed, in “developing” parts of the world. And
generativity always invites the possibility of an energetic shift to
productivity and creativity in the service of the generations.
2 While, in principle, I believe in such an evolutionary potential and the necessity to become aware of
it, I must admit that its presentation in a chart of modes and zones (Erikson 1963) can be misleading
in its configurational oversimplification.
3 The term, “other,” is taken from Freud’s letters to Fliess, where Freud confesses to seek “the
Other” (“der Andere”) in his correspondent (Freud 1887–1902). (See also Erikson 1955).
 3

Major Stages in Psychosocial Development

ABOUT THE TERMS USED—AND THE CHARTS

TO RESTATE the sequence of psychosocial stages throughout life means to

take responsibility for the terms Joan Erikson and I have originally attached
to them—terms that include such suspect words as hope, fidelity, and care.
These, we say, are among the psychosocial strengths that emerge from the
struggles of syntonic and dystonic tendencies at three crucial stages of life:
hope from the antithesis of basic trust vs. basic mistrust in infancy; fidelity
from that of identity vs. identity confusion in adolescence; and care from
generativity vs. self absorption in adulthood. (The vs. stands for “versus,”
and yet also, in the light of their complementarity, for something like “vice
versa.”) Most of these terms seem not foreign to the claim that, in the long
run, they represent basic qualities that, in fact, “qualify” a young person to
enter the generational cycle—and an adult to conclude it.
In regard to our terms in general, I will quote the late theoretical arbiter,
David Rapaport. Having tried to assign to me a firm place in ego psychology,
he cautioned his readers: “Erikson’s theory (like most of Freud’s) ranges
over phenomenological, specifically clinical psychoanalytic-psychological
propositions, without systematically differentiating among them.
Correspondingly, the conceptual status of this theory’s terms is so far
unclear” (Rapaport in Erikson 1959). The readers of this tract will know
what he is talking about. But if we accept the proposition that ritualization is
one link between developing egos and the ethos of their communality, living
languages must be considered one of the most outstanding forms of
ritualization in that they express both what is universally human and what is
culturally specific in the values conveyed by ritualized interplay. Thus, when
we approach the phenomena of human strength, the everyday words of living
languages, ripened in the usage of generations, will serve best as a basis of
discourse.

More specifically, if developmental considerations lead us to speak of

hope, fidelity, and care as the human strengths or ego qualities emerging
from such strategic stages as infancy, adolescence, and adulthood, it should
not surprise us (though it did when we became aware of it) that they
correspond to such major credal values as hope, faith, and charity. Skeptical
Vienna-trained readers, of course, will be reminded of the Austrian emperor
who, when asked to inspect the model of a new flamboyant baroque
memorial, declared with authority, “You need a bit more faith, hope, and
charity in the lower left corner!” Such proven traditional values, while
referring to the highest spiritual aspirations, must, in fact, have harbored from
their dim beginnings some relation to the developmental rudiments of human
strength; and it would be most instructive to pursue such parallels in different
traditions and languages.
For my talk on the generational cycle, in fact, I asked Sudhir Kakar for
the Hindu term corresponding to Care. He answered that there did not seem
to be one word for it, but that the adult is said to fulfill his tasks by practicing
Dāma (Restraint), Dana (Charity), and Daya (Compassion). These three
words, I could only reply, are well translated into everyday English with “to
be care-ful,” “to take care of,” and “to care for” (Erikson 1980).
But here, it may be helpful to call to mind the sequence of these stages
on the developmental ladder suggested by the epigenetic viewpoint, as
indicated in Chart 2. Especially since I intend, instead of always “to begin
again with the beginning,” to start this discussion of the psychosocial stages
high up on the last level of adulthood, it seems important to take a quick and
reassuring look at the whole ladder leading up to it. To complete the list of
strengths, it will be seen that between those of hope and fidelity we postulate
(in firm relation to the major developmental rungs) the steps of will, purpose,
and competence, and between fidelity and care, a step of love. Beyond care,
we even claim something called wisdom. But the chart also makes clear in its
verticals that each step (even wisdom) is grounded in all the previous ones;
while in each horizontal, the developmental maturation (and psychosocial
crisis) of one of these virtues gives new connotations to all the “lower” and
already developed stages as well as to the higher and still developing ones.
This can never be said often enough.
On the other hand, one may well ask how it is that we find the
epigenetic principle so practical in depicting the overall configuration of
psychosocial phenomena; does this not mean to give a somatic process
exclusive organizing power over a social one? The answer must be that the
stages of life remain throughout “linked” to somatic processes, even as they
remain dependent on the psychic processes of personality development and
on the ethical power of the social process.
 The epigenetic nature of this ladder, then, can be expected to be
reflected in a certain linguistic coherence of all terms. And indeed, such
words as hope, fidelity, and care have an inner logic that seems to confirm
developmental meanings. Hope is “expectant desire,” a phrase well in
accordance with a vague instinctual drivenness undergoing experiences that
awaken some firm expectations. It is also well in accord with our assumption
that this first basic strength and root of ego development emerges from the
resolution of the first developmental antithesis; namely, that of basic trust vs.
basic mistrust. And as to suggestive linguistic connotations, hope seems to
be related even to “hop” which means to leap; and we have always made the
most of the fact that Plato thought the model of all playfulness to be the leap
of young animals. At any rate, hope bestows on the anticipated future a sense
of leeway inviting expectant leaps, either in preparatory imagination or in
small initiating actions. And such daring must count on basic trust in the
sense of a trustfulness that must be, literally and figuratively, nourished by
maternal care and—when endangered by all-too-desperate discomfort—must
be restored by competent consolation, the German Trost. Correspondingly,
care reveals itself as the instinctual impulse to “cherish” and to “caress” that
which in its helplessness emits signals of despair. And if, in adolescence, the
age mediating between childhood and adulthood, we postulate the emergence
of the strength of fidelity (fidélité, fedeltà), this is not only a renewal on a
higher level of the capacity to trust (and to trust oneself), but also the claim to
be trustworthy, and to be able to commit one’s loyalty (the German Treue) to
a cause of whatever ideological denomination. A lack of confirmed fidelity,
however, will result in such pervasive symptomatic attitudes as diffidence or
defiance, and even a faithful attachment to diffident or defiant cliques and
causes. Thus, trust and fidelity are linguistically as well as epigenetically
related, and we see in our sickest young individuals, in adolescence,
semideliberate regression to the earliest developmental stage in order to
regain—unless they lose it altogether—some fundamentals of early Hope
from which to leap forward again.
To point to a developmental logic in such universal values as faith,
hope, and charity, however, does not mean to reduce them, in turn, to their
infantile roots. Rather, it forces us to consider how emerging human
strengths, step for step, are intrinsically beset not only with severe
vulnerabilities that perpetually demand our healing insights, but also with
basic evils which call for the redeeming values of universal belief systems
or ideologies.
So, somewhat encouraged, we will present the psychosocial stages.
And, as I said, I will this time begin with the last stage—that is, the top line
of our chart—and this not only out of methodological contrariness, but in
order to further the logic of the chart. As stated, the reading of the chart
demands that any line—horizontal or vertical—must be developmentally
related to any other, whether in the form of an earlier condition or of a later
consequence of demonstrable necessity. And this, it would seem, must be
possible to carry through in the case of a stage which acutely demands new
attention and concern in our day.

THE LAST STAGE

The dominant antithesis in old age and the theme of the last crisis we
termed integrity vs. despair. Here, the dystonic element may seem more
immediately convincing, considering the fact that the top line marks the total
end (unpredictable in time and kind) of this, our one given course of life.
Integrity, however, seems to convey a peculiar demand—as does the specific
strength that we postulate as maturing from this last antithesis—namely,
wisdom. This we have described as a kind of “informed and detached
concern with life itself in the face of death itself,” as expressed in age-old
adages and yet also potentially present in the simplest references to concrete
and daily matters. But then again, a more or less open disdain is the
antipathic counterpart to wisdom—a reaction to feeling (and seeing others)
in an increasing state of being finished, confused, helpless.
Before we try to make sense of such terminal contradictions we may
well ponder again the historical relativity of all development and, especially
also, of all developmental theories. Take this last stage: It was in our
“middle years” that we formulated it—at a time when we certainly had no
intention of (or capacity for) imagining ourselves as really old. This was
only a few decades ago; and yet, the predominant image of old age was then
altogether different. One could still think in terms of “elders,” the few wise
men and women who quietly lived up to their stage-appropriate assignment
and knew how to die with some dignity in cultures where long survival
appeared to be a divine gift to and a special obligation for a few. But do such
terms still hold when old age is represented by a quite numerous, fast-
increasing, and reasonably well-preserved group of mere “elderlies”? On the
other hand, should historical changes dissuade us from what we have once
perceived old age to be, in our own lifetime and according to the distilled
knowledge that has survived in folk wit as well as in folk wisdom?
No doubt, the role of old age needs to be reobserved, rethought. To this
we can here try to contribute only by reviewing our scheme. So back to the
chart: What is the place of old age in the length and the width of it? Located
as it is chronologically in the upper right corner, its last dystonic item, we
said, is despair; and as we take a quick glance at the lower left corner we
remember that down there the first syntonic element is hope. In Spanish, at
least, this bridges esperanza and desesperanza. And indeed, in whatever
language, hope connotes the most basic quality of “I”-ness, without which
life could not begin or meaningfully end. And as we ascend to the empty
square in the upper left corner, we realize that up there we need a word for
the last possible form of hope as matured along the whole first ascending
vertical: for this, certainly, the word faith suggests itself.
If, then, at the end the life cycle turns back on the beginnings, there has
remained something in the anatomy even of mature hope, and in a variety of
faiths (“Unless you turn and become like children . . .”), which confirms
hopefulness as the most childlike of all human qualities. And indeed, the last
stage of life seems to have great potential significance for the first; children
in viable cultures are made thoughtful in a specific way by encounters with
old people; and we may well ponder what will and must become of this
relationship in the future when a ripe old age will be an “averagely
expectable” experience, to be plan-fully anticipated. Thus, a historical
change like the lengthening of the average life span calls for viable
reritualizations, which must provide a meaningful interplay between
beginning and end as well as some finite sense of summary and, possibly, a
more active anticipation of dying. For all this, wisdom will still be a valid
word—and so, we think, will despair.
 Returning once more to the upper right corner, we retrace one step back
along the diagonal only to reenter the generative stage that preceded old age.
But in an epigenetic scheme, we said, “after” should mean only a later
version of a previous item, not a loss of it. And indeed, old people can and
need to maintain a grand-generative function. For there can be little doubt
that today the discontinuity of family life as a result of dis-location
contributes greatly to the lack in old age of that minimum of vital involvement
that is necessary for staying really alive. And lack of vital involvement often
seems to be the nostalgic theme hidden in the overt symptoms that bring old
people to psychotherapy. Much of their despair is, in fact, a continuing sense
of stagnation. This, it is said, may make some old people try to prolong their
therapies (King 1980), a new symptom easily mistaken for a mere regression
to early stages: and this, especially when old patients seem to be mourning
not only for time forfeited and space depleted but also (to follow the top line
of our chart from left to right) for autonomy weakened, initiative lost,
intimacy missed, generativity neglected—not to speak of identity potentials
bypassed or, indeed, an all too limiting identity lived. All of this, as we said,
may be “regression in the service of development” (Blos 1967)—that is, a
search for the solution of a (literally) age-specific conflict.
We will return to these questions in the final chapter. Here we wish to
emphasize in passing that in old age all qualities of the past assume new
values that we may well study in their own right and not just in their
antecedents—be they healthy or pathological. In more existential terms, that
the last stage finds one relatively freer of neurotic anxiety does not mean one
is absolved from the dread of life-and-death; the most acute understanding of
infantile guilt does not do away with the sense of evil that in each life is
experienced in its own way, just as the best-defined psychosocial identity
does not preempt the existential “I.” In sum, a better-functioning ego does not
synthesize away the aware “I.” And the social ethos must not abrogate its
responsibility for these ultimate perspectives that in history have been
prophetically envisaged by religious and political ideologies.
But to complete the review of our psychosocial conclusions: If the
antipathic counterpart of wisdom is disdain, this (like all antipathies), must
up to a point be recognized as a natural and necessary reaction to human
weakness and to the deadly repetitiveness of depravity and deceit. Disdain,
in fact, is altogether denied only at the danger of indirect destructiveness and
more or less hidden self-disdain.
What is the last ritualization built into the style of old age? I think it is
philo-sophical: for in maintaining some order and meaning in the dis-
integration of body and mind, it can also advocate a durable hope in wisdom.
The corresponding ritualistic danger, however, is dogmatism, a compulsive
pseudointegrity that, where linked to undue power, can become coercive
orthodoxy.
And what final psychosexual state can we suggest for (presenile) old
age? I think it is a generalization of sensual modes that can foster an
enriched bodily and mental experience even as part functions weaken and
genital energy diminishes. (Obviously, such extensions of the libido theory
call for discussion and are therefore rendered in parenthesis on Chart 1.)
And so we return to what we claimed to be the dominant syntonic trait
in the last stage; namely, integrity. This in its simplest meaning is, of course,
a sense of coherence and wholeness that is, no doubt, at supreme risk under
such terminal conditions as include a loss of linkages in all three organizing
processes: in the Soma, the pervasive weakening of tonic interplay in
connecting tissues, blood-distributing vessels, and the muscle system; in the
Psyche, the gradual loss of mnemonic coherence in experience, past and
present; and in the Ethos, the threat of a sudden and nearly total loss of
responsible function in generative interplay. What is demanded here could be
simply called “integrality,” a tendency to keep things together. And indeed,
we must acknowledge in old age a retrospective mythologizing that can
amount to a pseudointegration as a defence against lurking despair. (Such
defensive use can, of course, be made of all syntonic qualities dominating the
chart’s diagonal.) Yet throughout, we must allow for a human being’s
potential capacity, under favorable conditions, more or less actively to let the
integrative experience of earlier stages come to fruition; and so, our chart
allows, up the rightmost vertical, for the gradual maturation of integrity.
So let me take another look at the way we put all this when we first
formulated integrity: But if the old in some respects become again like
children, the question is whether this “turn” is to a childlikeness seasoned
with wisdom or to a finite childishness. (The old may become, or want to
become, too old too fast or remain too young too long.) Here, only some
sense of integrity can bind things together; and by integrity we cannot mean
only a rare quality of personal character but above all a shared proclivity for
understanding or for “hearing” those who do understand, the integrative ways
of human life. It is a comradeship with the ordering ways of distant times and
different pursuits, as expressed in their simple products and sayings. But
there emerges also a different, a timeless love for those few “Others” who
have become the main counterplayers in life’s most significant contexts. For
individual life is the coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment
of history; and all human integrity stands or falls with the one style of
integrity of which one partakes.

THE GENERATIONAL LINK: ADULTHOOD

Having now reviewed the end of the life cycle as much as my context
permitted, I do feel an urgency to enlarge on a “real” stage—that is, one that
mediates between two stages of life—and of the generational cycle itself.
This sense of urgency seems best expressed in the story of the old man who
was dying. As he lay there with his eyes closed, his wife whispered to him,
naming every member of the family who was there to wish him shalom. “And
who,” he suddenly asked, sitting up abruptly, “who is minding the store?”
This expresses the spirit of adulthood which the Hindus call “the
maintenance of the world.”
Our two adult stages, adulthood and young adulthood, are not meant to
preempt all the possible substages of the period between adolescence and
old age; yet, appreciative as we are of the alternative subdivisions suggested
by other workers, we repeat our original conclusions here—primarily in
order to convey the global logic of any such scheme. This means, within the
re-view attempted here, that as we proceed to the next preceding stage it
should above all prove to have been developmentally indispensable for the
later stages already described. As to the age range appropriate to all such
stages, it stands to reason that they are circumscribed by the earliest moment
at which, considering all the necessary conditions, a developmental quality
can come to relative dominance and to a meaningful crisis, and the latest
moment at which, for the sake of overall development, it must yield that
critical dominance to the next quality. In this succession, rather wide
temporal ranges are possible; but the sequence of stages remains
predetermined.
To adulthood (our seventh stage) we have assigned the critical
antithesis of generativity vs. self-absorption and stagnation. Generativity,
we said, encompasses procreativity, productivity, and creativity, and thus
the generation of new beings as well as of new products and new ideas,
including a kind of self-generation concerned with further identity
development. A sense of stagnation, in turn, is by no means foreign even to
those who are most intensely productive and creative, while it can totally
overwhelm those who find themselves inactivated in generative matters. The
new “virtue” emerging from this antithesis, namely, Care, is a widening
commitment to take care of the persons, the products, and the ideas one has
learned to care for. All the strengths arising from earlier developments in the
ascending order from infancy to young adulthood (hope and will, purpose
and skill, fidelity and love) now prove, on closer study, to be essential for
the generational task of cultivating strength in the next generation. For this is,
indeed, the “store” of human life.
Is not procreativity, then (we have asked), a further step rather than a
mere byproduct of genitality (1980(c))? Since every genital encounter
engages the procreative organs in some arousal and in principle can result in
conception, a psychobiological need for procreation can, it seems, not be
ignored. At any rate, the young adults’ capacity (acquired in the preceding
stage of intimacy vs. isolation) to lose themselves so as to find one another
in the meeting of bodies and minds, is apt to lead sooner or later to a
vigorous expansion of mutual interests and to a libidinal investment in that
which is being generated and cared for together. Where generative
enrichment in its various forms fails altogether, regressions to earlier stages
may occur either in the form of an obsessive need for pseudo-intimacy or of a
compulsive kind of preoccupation with self-imagery—and both with a
pervading sense of stagnation.
Stagnation, like the antitheses in all stages, marks the potential core
pathology of this stage and will, of course, involve some regression to
previous conflicts. Yet it must be understood also in its stage-specific
importance. This, as indicated, is especially important today when sexual
frustration is recognized as pathogenic, while generative frustration,
according to the dominant technological ethos of birth control, is apt to
remain unrecognized. Yet, sublimation, or a wider application, is the best use
of frustrated drive energies. Thus today, as we have said, a new generative
ethos may call for a more universal care concerned with a qualitative
improvement in the lives of all children. Such new caritas would make the
developed populations offer the developing ones, beyond contraceptives and
food packages, some joint guarantee of a chance for the vital development as
well as for the survival—of every child born.
But here I must continue the account of those other sets of phenomena
characteristic of every stage of life that are of fateful consequence for group
life and for the survival of mankind itself. If care (as all other strengths cited)
is the expression of a vital sympathic trend with a high instinctual energy at
its disposal, there is also a corresponding antipathic trend. In old age, we
called such a trend disdain; in the stage of generativity, it is rejectivity; that
is, the unwilligness to include specified persons or groups in one’s
generative concern—one does not care to care for them. There is, of course,
a certain logic to the fact that in man the (instinctual) elaboration of
(instinctive) caretaking tends to be highly selective in favor of what is or can
be made to be most “familiar.” In fact, one cannot ever be generative and
care-ful without being selective to the point of some distinct rejectivity. It is
for this very reason that ethics, law, and insight must define the bearable
measure of rejectivity in any given group, even as religious and ideological
belief systems must continue to advocate a more universal principle of care
for specified wider units of communities. It is here, in fact, where such
spiritual concepts as a universal caritas give their ultimate support to an
extending application of developmentally given care. And caritas has much
to keep in abeyance, for rejectivity can express itself in intrafamilial and
communal life as a more or less well-rationalized and more or less ruthless
suppression of what does not seem to fit some set goals of survival and
perfection. This can mean physical or moral cruelty against one’s children,
and it can turn, as moralistic prejudice, against other segments of family or
community. And, of course, it can lump together as “the other side” large
groups of foreign peoples. (At any rate, it is a task of every case study to
make explicit the way in which some of our young patients are types who
have become the focus of the rejectivity of generations—and not merely of a
“rejecting mother.”)
Rejectivity, furthermore, periodically finds a vast area for collective
manifestation—such as in wars against (often neighboring) collectivities who
once more appear to be a threat to one’s own kind, and this not only by dint
of conflicting territorialities or markets, but simply by seeming dangerously
different—and who, of course are apt to reciprocate this sentiment. The
conflict between generativity and rejection, thus, is the strongest ontogenetic
anchor of the universal human propensity that I have called
pseudospeciation. Konrad Lorenz fittingly translates it as Quasi-
Artenbildung (1973); that is, the conviction (and the impulses and actions
based on it) that another type or group of persons are, by nature, history, or
divine will, a species different from one’s own—and dangerous to mankind
itself.4 It is a prime human dilemma that pseudospeciation can bring out the
truest and best in loyalty and heroism, cooperation and inventiveness, while
committing different human kinds to a history of reciprocal enmity and
destruction. The problem of human rejectivity, then, has far-reaching
implications for the survival of the species as well as for every individual’s
psychosocial development; where rejectivity is merely inhibited, there may
well be self-rejection.
In accordance with our promise, we must also allocate to each stage a
specific form of ritualization. An adult must be ready to become a numinous
model in the next generation’s eyes and to act as a judge of evil and a
transmitter of ideal values. Therefore, adults must and do also ritualize being
ritualizers; and there is an ancient need and custom to participate in some
rituals that ceremonially sanction and reinforce that role. This whole adult
element in ritualization we may simply call the generative one. It includes
such auxiliary ritualizations as the parental and the didactic, the productive
and the curative.
The ritualism potentially rampant in adulthood is, I think, autboritism
—the ungenerous and ungenerative use of sheer power for the regimentation
of economic and familial life. Genuine generativity, of course, includes a
measure of true authority.
Mature adulthood, however, emerges from young adulthood, which,
psychosexually speaking, depends on a postadolescent genital mutuality as a
libidinal model of true intimacy. An immense power of verification pervades
this meeting of bodies and temperaments after the hazardously long human
preadulthood.
Young adults emerging from the adolescent search for a sense of identity
can be eager and willing to fuse their identities in mutual intimacy and to
share them with individuals who, in work, sexuality, and friendship promise
to prove complementary. One can often be “in love” or engage in intimacies,
but the intimacy now at stake is the capacity to commit oneself to concrete
affiliations which may call for significant sacrifices and compromises.
The psychosocial antithesis to intimacy, however, is isolation, a fear of
remaining separate and “unrecognized”—which provides a deep motivation
for the entranced ritualization of a, now genitally mature, “I”-“you”
experience such as marked the beginning of one’s existence. A sense of
isolation, then, is the potential core pathology of early adulthood. There are,
in fact, affiliations that amount to an isolation á deux, protecting both
partners from the necessity to face the next critical development—that of
generativity. But the greatest danger of isolation is a regressive and hostile
reliving of the identity conflict and, in the case of a readiness for regression,
a fixation on the earliest conflict with the primal Other. This can emerge as
“borderline” pathology. From the resolution of the antithesis between
intimacy and isolation, however, emerges love, that mutuality of mature
devotion that promises to resolve the antagonisms inherent in divided
function.
The antipathic counterforce to young adult intimacy and love is
exclusivity, which, in form and function, is of course closely related to the
rejectivity emerging in later adulthood. Again, some exclusivity is as
essential to intimacy as rejectivity is to generativity; yet both can become
vastly destructive—and self-destructive. For the incapacity to reject or
exclude anything at all can only lead to (or be the result of) excessive self-
rejection and, as it were, self-exclusion.
Intimacy and generativity are obviously closely related, but intimacy
must first provide an affiliative kind of ritualization that cultivates styles of
ingroup living held together by often extremely idiosyncratic ways of
behaving and speaking. For intimacy remains the guardian of that elusive and
yet all-pervasive power in psychosocial evolution, the power of communal
and personal style: which gives and demands conviction in the shared
patterns of living; guarantees some individual identity even in joint intimacy;
and binds into a way of life the solidarity of a joint commitment to a style of
production. These, at least, are the high goals to which development, in
principle, is tuned. But then, this is the stage when persons of very different
backgrounds must fuse their habitual ways to form a new milieu for
themselves and their offspring: a milieu reflecting the (gradual or radical)
change of mores and the shifts in dominant identity patterns being brought
about by historical change.
The ritualism apt to make an unproductive caricature of the
ritualizations of young adulthood is elitism, which cultivates all sorts of
cliques and clans marked more by snobbery than by a living style.

ADOLESCENCE AND SCHOOL AGE

To proceed further back: the reliability of young adult commitments

largely depends on the outcome of the adolescent struggle for identity.
Epigenetically speaking, of course, nobody can quite “know” who he or she
“is” until promising partners in work and love have been encountered and
tested. Yet, the basic patterns of identity must emerge from (1) the selective
affirmation and repudiation of an individual’s childhood identifications; and
(2) the way in which the social process of the times identifies young
individuals—at best recognizing them as persons who had to become the way
they are and who, being the way they are, can be trusted. The community, in
turn, feels recognized by the individual who cares to ask for such
recognition. By the same token, however, society can feel deeply and
vengefully rejected by the individual who does not seem to care to be
acceptable, in which case society thoughtlessly dooms many whose ill-fated
search for communality (in gang loyalty, for example) it cannot fathom or
absorb.
The antithesis of identity is identity confusion, obviously a normative
and necessary experience that can, however, form a core disturbance
aggravating and aggravated by pathological regression.
 How is the psychosocial concept of identity related to the self—that
core concept of individual psychology? As pointed out, a pervasive sense of
identity brings into gradual accord the variety of changing self-images that
have been experienced during childhood (and that, during adolescence, can
be dramatically recapitulated) and the role opportunities offering themselves
to young persons for selection and commitment. On the other hand, a lasting
sense of self cannot exist without a continuous experience of a conscious “I,”
which is the numinous center of existence: a kind of existential identity, then,
which (as we noted in discussing old age) in the “last line” must gradually
transcend the psychosocial one. Therefore, adolescence harbors some
sensitive, if fleeting, sense of existence as well as a sometimes passionate
interest in ideological values of all kinds—religious, political, intellectual—
including, at times, an ideology of adjustment to the time’s patterns of
adjustment and success. Here, the upheavals characterizing the adolescence
of other times can remain strangely dormant. And then again, adolescence can
harbor existential preoccupations of the kind that can “come of age” only in
old age.
The specific strength emerging in adolescence—namely, fidelity—
maintains a strong relation both to infantile trust and to mature faith. As it
transfers the need for guidance from parental figures to mentors and leaders,
fidelity eagerly accepts their ideological mediatorship—whether the
ideology is one implicit in a “way of life” or a militantly explicit one. The
antipathic counterpart of fidelity, however, is role repudiation: an active and
selective drive separating roles and values that seem workable in identity
formation from what must be resisted or fought as alien to the self. Role
repudiation can appear in the form of diffidence covering a certain slowness
and weakness in relation to any available identity potential or in the form of
a systematic defiance. This last, is a perverse preference for the (always
also present) negative identity; that is, a combination of socially
unacceptable and yet stubbornly affirmed identity elements. If the social
setting fails to offer any viable alternatives, all this can lead to a sudden and
sometimes “borderline” regression to the conflicts of the earliest experiences
of the sense of “I,” almost as a desperate attempt at self-rebirth.
Yet again, an identity formation is impossible without some role
repudiation, especially where the available roles endanger the young
individual’s potential identity synthesis. Role repudiation, then, helps to
delimit one’s identity and invokes at least experimental loyalties that can then
be “confirmed” and transformed into lasting affiliations by the proper
ritualizations or rituals. Nor is some role repudiation expendable in the
societal process, for continued readaptation to changing circumstances can
often only be maintained with the help of loyal rebels who refuse to “adjust”
to “conditions” and who cultivate an indignation in the service of a renewed
wholeness of ritualization, without which psychosocial evolution would be
doomed.
In summary, the process of identity formation emerges as an evolving
configuration—a configuration that gradually integrates constitutional
givens, idiosyncratic libidinal needs, favored capacities, significant
identifications, effective defenses, successful sublimations, and consistent
roles. All these, however, can only emerge from a mutual adaptation of
individual potentials, technological world views, and religious or political
ideologies.
The spontaneous ritualizations of this stage can, of course, appear
surprising, confusing, and aggravating in the shiftiness of the adolescents’
first attempts to ritualize their interplay with age mates and to create small
group rituals. But they also foster participation in public events on sports
fields and concert grounds and in political and religious arenas. In all of
these, young people can be seen to seek a form of ideological confirmation,
and here spontaneous rites and formal rituals merge. Such search, however,
can also lead to fanatic participation in militant ritualisms marked by
totalism; that is, a totalization of the world image so illusory that it lacks the
power of self-renewal and can become destructively fanatic.
Adolescence and the ever more protracted apprenticeship of the later
school and college years can, as we saw, be viewed as a psychosocial
moratorium: a period of sexual and cognitive maturation and yet a
sanctioned postponement of definitive commitment. It provides a relative
leeway for role experimentation, including that with sex roles, all significant
for the adaptive self-renewal of society. The earlier school age, in turn, is a
psychosexual moratorium, for its beginning coincides with what
psychoanalysis calls the “latency” period, marked by some dormancy of
infantile sexuality and a postponement of genital maturity. Thus the future
mate and parent may first undergo whatever method of schooling is provided
for in his society and learn the technical and social rudiments of a work
situation. We have ascribed to this period the psychosocial crsis of industry
vs. inferiority—the first being a basic sense of competent activity adapted
both to the laws of the tool world and to the rules of cooperation in planned
and scheduled procedures. And again, one can say that a child at this stage
learns to love to learn as well as to play—and to learn most eagerly those
techniques which are in line with the ethos of production. A certain
hierarchy of work roles has already entered the playing and learning child’s
imagination by way of ideal examples, real or mythical, that now present
themselves in the persons of instructing adults, and in the heroes of legend,
history, and fiction.
For the antithesis of a sense of industry we have postulated a sense of
inferiority, again a necessary dystonic sense, that helps drive on the best
even as it can (temporarily) paralyze the poorer workers. As core pathology
of this stage, however, inferiority is apt to encompass much fateful conflict; it
can drive the child to excessive competition or induce it to regress—which
can only mean a renewal of infantile-genital and oedipal conflict, and thus a
preoccupation in fantasy with conflictual personages rather than an actual
encounter with the helpful ones right at hand. The rudimentary strength
developing at this stage, however, is competence, a sense that in the growing
human being must gradually integrate all the maturing methods of verifying
and mastering factuality and of sharing the actuality of those who cooperate
in the same productive situation.

We have now attempted to point up the nexus of instinctual forces and

organismic modes within a context of the sequence of psychosocial stages
and the succession of generations. We emphasized primarily some principles
of development, the interdisciplinary recognition of which seemed essential
at the time of their formulations, although we cannot insist on the exact
number of stages listed or, indeed, on all the terms used; clearly, for any
overall confirmation of our scheme we remain dependent on a number of
disciplines which in these pages were bypassed.
On the psychological side, there is the verifying power of cognitive
growth as it refines and expands with each stage the capacity for accurate
and conceptual interplay with the factual world. This certainly is a most
indispensable “ego-apparatus” in Hartmann’s sense (1939). So it may prove
useful to trace the relation of the “sensory-motor” aspects of intelligence in
Piaget’s sense to infantile trust; of the “intuitive-symbolic” ones to play and
initiative; of “concrete-operational” performance to the sense of industry;
and finally, of “formal operations” and “logical manipulations” to identity
development (see Greenspan 1979). Piaget, who patiently listened at some of
our early interdisciplinary meetings to what is outlined here, later confirmed
that he saw at least no contradiction between his stages and ours. “Piaget,”
Greenspan reports, “is quite sympathetic to Erikson’s extension of Freudian
theory into psychosocial modes” (1979). And he quotes him: “The great
merit of Erikson’s stages ... is precisely that he attempted, by situating the
Freudian mechanisms within more general types of conduct (walking,
exploring, etc.) to postulate continual integration of previous acquisitions at
subsequent levels’ ” (Piaget 1960).
The antipathic counterpart of industry, the sense of competent mastery
to be experienced in the school age, is that inertia that constantly threatens to
paralyze an individual’s productive life and is, of course, fatefully related to
the inhibition of the preceding age, that of play.

THE PRESCHOOL YEARS

The childhood stages were already discussed in connection with

epigenesis, pregenitality, and ritualization. Here, it remains for us to add only
a summary statement on their antitheses and antipathies.
Let us return, then, to the play age, in which the antithesis of initiative
and guilt comes to its crisis. As we can only repeat, playfulness is an
essential ingredient in all the stages to come. But just when oedipal
implications force a strong limitation of initiative on the child’s relation with
parental figures, maturing play liberates the small individual for a
dramatization in the microsphere of a vast number of imagined identifications
and activities. The play age, furthermore, “occurs” before the limiting advent
of the school age, with its defined work roles, and of adolescence, with its
experimentation in identity potentials. It is no accident, then, that to this stage
is ascribed the infantile origin of the Oedipus drama, which in its mythology,
and especially in its perfection as a play on the stage, proves to be a prime
example of the lifelong power of human playfulness in all the arts. In
playfulness is grounded, also, all sense of humor, man’s specific gift to laugh
at himself as well as at others.
All this, however, also makes it plausible that in the play age inhibition
is the antipathic counterpart of initiative—a necessary counterpart in so
playful and imaginative a creature. Yet inhibition also proves to be the core
pathology in later psychoneurotic disturbances (from the hysterias on) that
are rooted in the conflicted oedipal stage.
The stage preceding the play age is that “anal” stage of conflict which
was first found to be the infantile “fixation” point in compulsion-neurotic
disturbances. Psychosocially speaking, we consider it to be the crisis of
autonomy vs. shame and doubt, from the resolution of which emerges
rudimentary will. As we again look at the place of this stage between the
preceding and the succeeding stages, it seems developmentally “reasonable”
that what we have just described as initiative could not have developed
without a decisive leap from oral sensory dependence to some anal-muscular
self-will and to a certain assured self-control. We have indicated earlier how
children can alternate between willful impulsivity and slavish
compulsiveness; the child will try at times to act totally independent by
altogether identifying with his rebellious impulses or to become dependent
once more by making the will of others his own compulsion. In balancing
these two tendencies, rudimentary will power supports a maturation both of
free choice and of self-restraint. The human being must try early to will what
can be, to renounce (as not worth willing) what cannot be, and to believe he
willed what is inevitable by necessity and law. At any rate, in accord with
the double (retentive and eliminative) modes dominating this age,
compulsion and impulsivity are the antipathic counterparts of will and, when
aggravated and interlocked, can paralyze it.
Even in descending order, it must have become reasonably clear now
that what thus grows in steps is indeed an epigenetic ensemble in which no
stage and no strength must have missed its early rudiments, its “natural”
crisis, and its potential renewal in all later stages. Thus, hope in infancy can
already have an element of willfulness that cannot, however, stand being
challenged as yet in the way it must be when the crisis of will arrives in
early childhood. On the other hand, one glance back at the “last line” makes
it appear probable that an infant’s hope already has some ingredient that will
gradually grow to become faith—although that will be harder to defend
against all but the most fanatic devotees of infancy. On the other hand, does
not Laotse’s name mean “old child” and refer to a newborn with a tiny white
beard?
Hope, we have said, emerges from the conflict of basic trust vs. basic
mistrust. Hope is, so to speak, pure future; and where mistrust prevails early,
anticipation, as we know, wanes both cognitively and emotionally. But where
hope prevails, it has, as we indicated, the function of carrying out the
numinous image of the primal other through the various forms it may take in
the intermediate stages, all the way to the confrontation with the ultimate
other—in whatever exalted form—and a dim promise of regaining, forever, a
paradise almost forfeited. By the same token, autonomy and will, as well as
industry and purpose, are oriented toward a future that will remain open, in
play and in preparatory work, for the choices of one’s economic, cultural,
and historical era. Identity and fidelity, in turn, must begin to commit
themselves to choices involving some finite combinations of activities and
values. Youth, in alliance with available ideologies, can envisage a wide
spectrum of possibilities of “salvation” and “damnation”; while the love of
young adulthood is inspired by dreams of what one may be able to do and to
take care of together. With the love and care of adulthood, however, there
gradually arises a most critical midlife factor, namely, the evidence of a
narrowing of choices by conditions already irreversibly chosen—by fate or
by oneself. Now conditions, circumstances, and associations have become
one’s once-in-one-lifetime reality. Adult care thus must concentrate jointly on
the means of taking lifelong care of what one has irrevocably chosen, or,
indeed, has been forced to choose by fate, so as to care for it within the
technological demands of the historical moment.
Gradually, then, and with every new strength, a new time sense appears
along with a sense of irrevocable identity: gradually becoming what one has
caused to be, one eventually will be what one has been. Lifton (1970) has
vastly clarified what it means to be a survivor, but a person in adulthood
must also realize (as Laius did) that a generator will be survived by what he
generated. Not that any of this is all too conscious; on the contrary, it seems
that the stage of generativity, as long as a threatening sense of stagnation is
kept at bay, is pervasively characterized by a supremely sanctioned disregard
of death. Youth, in its own way, is more aware of death than adulthood is;
although adults, busy as they are with “maintaining the world,” participate in
the grand rituals of religion, art, and politics, all of which mythologize and
ceremonialize death, giving it ritual meaning and thus an intensely social
presence. Youth and old age, then, are the times that dream of rebirth, while
adulthood is too busy taking care of actual births and is rewarded for it with
a unique sense of boisterous and timeless historical reality—a sense which
can seem somewhat unreal to the young and to the old, for it denies the
shadow of nonbeing.

The reader may now wish to review the categories listed on Chart 1.
For each psychosocial stage, “located” as it is between .a psychosexual one
(A) and an expanding social radius (C) we list a core crisis (B) during
which the development of a specific syntonic potential (from basic trust [I]
to integrity [VIII]) must outbalance that of its dystonic antithesis (from basic
mistrust to senile despair). The resolution of each crisis results in the
emergence of a basic strength or ego quality (from hope to wisdom) (D).
But such sympathic strength, too, has an antipathic counterpart (from
withdrawal to disdain) (E). Both syntonic and dystonic and both sympathic
and antipathic potentials are necessary for human adaptation because the
human being does not share the animal’s fate of developing according to an
instinctive adaptation to a circumscribed natural environment that permits a
clear-cut and inborn division of positive and negative reactions. Rather, the
human being must be guided during a long childhood to develop instinctual
reaction patterns of love and aggression that can be mustered for a variety of
cultural environments vastly different in technology, style, and world view,
although each supporting what Hartmann (1939) has called certain “average
expectable” conditions. But where the dystonic and antipathic trends
outweigh the syntonic and sympathic, a specific core pathology develops
(from psychotic withdrawal to senile depression).
Ego synthesis and communal ethos together tend to support a certain
measure of syntonic and sympathic trends, while they attempt to
accommodate some dystonic and antipathic ones in the great variability of
human dynamics. But these dystonic and antipathic trends remain a constant
threat to the individual and social order, wherefore, in the course of history,
inclusive belief systems (religions, ideologies, cosmic theories) have
attempted to universalize the sympathic human trends by making them
applicable to a widening combination of worthy “insiders.” Such belief
systems, in turn, become an essential part of each individual’s development
in that their ethos (which “actuates manners and customs, moral attitudes and
ideals”) is conveyed in daily life through age-specific and stage-adequate
ritualizations (G). These enlist the energy of growth in the renewal of
certain all-embracing principles (from the numinous to the philosophical).
Wherever ego and ethos lose their viable interconnection, however, these
ritualizations threaten to disintegrate into deadening ritualisms (from idolism
to dogmatism) (H). Because of their joint developmental roots, there is a
dynamic affinity between individual core disturbances and social ritualisms
(cf. E and H).
Thus, each new human being receives and internalizes the logic and the
strength of the principles of social order (from the cosmic through the legal
and the technological to the ideological and beyond) (F) and develops the
readiness under favorable conditions to convey them to the next generations.
All this, at any rate, must be recognized as one of the essential built-in
potentials for development and recovery, even if daily clinical experience
and general observation are apt to confront us with the symptoms of
unresolved crises in individuals and with the social pathology of ritualistic
decomposition.
All of this brings us to the borders of another complementary study here
neglected: which would include the institutional structures and
mechanisms that make for the politics of communality. True, we have
attempted to account for the ritualizations of everyday life that provide the
link between individual development and social structure: their “politics” is
easily discernible in any record or case study of intimate social interplay.
And we have, in passing, related the special strengths emerging from trust
and hope with religion, from autonomy and will with the law, from initiative
and purpose with the arts, from industry and competence with technology and
from identity and fidelity with the ideological order. Yet, we must depend on
social science for accounts of how, in given systems and periods, leading
individuals as well as elites and power groups strive to preserve, to renew,
or replace the all-encompassing ethos in productive and political life, and
how they tend to support the generative potentials in adults and the readiness
for growth and development in those growing up. In my work, I have only
been able to suggest an approach to the lives, and to the critical stages within
these lives, of two religious-political leaders—namely, Martin Luther and
Mohandas Gandhi (1958; 1969)—who were able to translate their personal
conflicts into methods of spiritual and political renewal in the lives of a
large contingent of their contemporaries.
This leads us to psychohistorical work. But in the conclusion of this
essay it seems best in a few brief notes to ask in what way the psychoanalytic
method may gain from psychosocial insight and yield observations conducive
to it. This brings us back to the very beginning of this review.
4 The word “pseudo,” in its naturalist meaning, does not imply deliberate deception. Rather, it
suggests a grandiose, all-human tendency to create more or less playfully appearances that make
one’s own kind a spectacular and unique sight in creation and in history—a potentially creative
tendency, then, that can lead to most dangerous extremes.
 4

Ego and Ethos: Concluding Notes

EGO DEFENSE AND SOCIAL ADAPTATION

IN The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, Anna Freud “deals exclusively
with one particular problem; that is, with the ways and means by which the
ego wards off unpleasure and anxiety, and exercises control over impulsive
behavior, affects, and instinctive urges” (1936, p. 5). Thus, the various
omnipresent defenses such as repression and regression, denial and reaction
formation, are treated exclusively as phenomena of inner economy. In
February 1973, in Philadelphia, on the occasion of a panel devoted to a
review of Anna Freud’s book (then in its thirty-seventh year), the opportunity
offered itself to discuss some of the social and communal implications of the
mechanisms of defense. Can defense mechanisms, we asked, be shared and
thus assume an ecological value in the lives of interrelated persons and in
communal life?
There are passages in Anna Freud’s book that clearly point to such a
potential. Most obvious, of course, is the similarity of certain individual
defense mechanisms and the grand ritual defenses of communities. Take, for
example, the “identification with the aggressor:” There is the little girl who
—for whatever acute reasons—is afraid of ghosts and bans them by making
peculiar gestures, thus pretending to be the ghost she might meet in the hall.
And we may think of “children’s games in which through the metamorphosis
of the subject into a dreaded object anxiety is converted into pleasurable
security” (A. Freud 1936). Correspondingly, there are, throughout cultural
history, all the “primitive methods of exorcising spirits” by impersonating
them in their most aggressive forms.
Anna Freud reports on some observations in a particular school that in
pursuit of modernity had reritualized (as we would say) its procedures,
putting “less emphasis on class teaching” and more on “self-chosen
individual work” (1936, p. 95). Immediately, some new and yet well-
circumscribed defensive behavior of an intimidated and inhibited sort
appeared in a number of children previously known to be quite able and
popular; their very adaptiveness seemed endangered by the changed
demands. A. Freud suggests that such a shared defense, though engaged in
genuinely by each individual, could quickly disappear again if the school
abandoned its wayward ritualizations. But what are the social mechanisms of
such shared defense that in the long run, at any rate, might become habitual
and thus permanently change some personalities and careers, as well as the
ethos of group life?
Finally, we may well ponder again the social implications of such an
adolescent defense mechanism as intellectualization in puberty—that is, the
seemingly excessive preoccupation with ideas including (in the Vienna of
that day) “the demand for revolution in the outside world.” Anna Freud
interprets this as a defense on the part of these youths against “the perception
of the new institutional demands of their own id.”; that is, the inner,
instinctual revolution. This, no doubt, is the psychosexual aspect of the
matter; but it stands to reason that intellectual defenses appear and are shared
in puberty both as a result of the cognitive gains of this stage and as an
adaptive use of the ritualizations of an intellectual ethos characteristic of
some times. The societal process, in fact, must count on and acknowledge
such adolescent processes, including their periodical excesses, for its
readaptation to a changing ethos.
It appears probable, then, that defense mechanisms are not only molded
to the individual’s instinctual urges that they are to contain but, where they
work relatively well, are shared or counterpointed as part of the ritualized
interplay of individuals and families as well as of larger units. But where
they are weak, rigid, and altogether isolating, defense mechanisms may well
be comparable to individualized and internalized ritualisms.
 Anna Freud recalled some of her own experiences as a teacher as well
as “long discussions at her clinic as to whether obsessional children of
obsessional parents used obsessional mechanisms out of imitation or
identification or whether they shared with their parents the danger arising
from strong sadistic tendencies and, independently of their parents, used the
appropriate defense mechanism” (Journal of the Philadelphia Assn. for
Psychoanalysis, 1974).

I AND WE

The discussion of ego-defences brought us back to the period of what at

times was called an Ego-Psychology, even as today we are faced with a Self-
Psychology with similar aspirations. I myself could not relate either of these
directions with psychosocial theory without, paradoxically, discussing what
is most individual in man and yet also most basic for a communal sense of
“we.” I mean the sense of “I” that is the individual’s central awareness of
being a sensory and thinking creature endowed with language, who can
confront a self (composed, in fact, of a number of selves), and can construct a
concept of an unconscious ego. I would assume, in fact, that the ego’s
synthesizing methods in establishing workable defenses against undesirable
impulses and affects restore to what we call a sense of “I” certain basic
modes of existence now to be discussed—namely, a sense of being centered
and active, whole and aware—and thus overcome a feeling of being
peripheral or inactivated, fragmented, and obscured.
But here we face a strange blind spot in intellectual interest. The “I,” an
overweaning existential, personological, and linguistic fact, is hard to find in
dictionaries and in psychological texts. But most important for us, in the
psychoanalytic literature Freud’s original use of its German equivalent, Ich,
is habitually translated into “ego” (Erikson 1981). And yet this ich is at times
most clearly meant to mean “I.” This is particularly true where Freud (1923)
ascribes to the Ich an “immediacy” and “certainty” of experience “on
which all consciousness depends” (italics mine). This is by no means a
matter of simple double meaning, but one of decisive conceptual import. For
the unconscious can become known only to an immediate and certain
consciousness—a consciousness, furthermore, that through evolution and
history seems to have reached a decisive state when it must confront itself
with rational methods, thus becoming aware of its own denial of the
unconscious and learning to study the consequences. Nevertheless, this
elemental consciousness, to Freud, seems to have been one of those primal
human facts which he took for granted (selbstverständlich) and on which, for
the moment, he imperiously refused to reflect. Considering the width and the
passion of his own aesthetic, moral, and scientific awareness, one must
consider this exclusive concentration on the unconscious and on the id an
almost ascetic commitment to the study of what is most obscure and yet also
most elemental in human motivation. Yet, it should be noted that his method,
in order to make the unconscious yield anything, had to employ playfully
configurational means such as “free” association, dream, or play itself—all
special means of awareness. Systematic interpretation, meanwhile, works
toward an expansion of consciousness. And indeed, in a significant passage
Freud refers to consciousness as “die Leucbte,” which can only be translated
as “the shining light” (S. Freud 1933). Typically, he accompanies this almost
religious expression with an ironic note and says about consciousness: “As
may be said of our life, it is not worth much, but it is all we have. Without the
illumination thrown by the quality of consciousness we should be lost in the
obscurity of depth psychology.” Yet, typically, to his translator the word
“illumination” sufficed for die Leucbte.
In subjecting the psychoanalytic technique itself to the stringent and
ascetic rules that deprive it of the character of a social encounter, Freud put
the self-observing “I” and the shared “we” into the exclusive service of the
study of the unconscious. This has proven to be a meditative procedure
which can yield unheard-of healing insight for those individuals who feel
disturbed enough to need it, curious enough to want it, and healthy enough to
“take” it—a selection that can make the psychoanalyzed in some communities
feel, indeed, like a new kind of elite. But a more systematic study of “I” and
“we” would seem to be not only necessary for an understanding of
psychosocial phenomena, but also elemental for a truly comprehensive
psychoanalytic psychology. I am, of course, aware of the linguistic difficulty
of speaking of the “I” as we do of the ego or the self; and yet, it does take a
sense of “I” to be aware of a “myself” or, indeed, of a series of myselves,
while all the variations of self-experience have in common (and a saving
grace it is) the conscious continuity of the “I” that experienced and can
become aware of them all. Thus, the “I,” after all, is the ground for the
simple verbal assurance that each person is a center of awareness in a
universe of communicable experience, a center so numinous that it amounts to
a sense of being alive and, more, of being the vital condition of existence. At
the same time, only two or more persons who share a corresponding world
image and can bridge their languages may merge their “I”s into a “we.” It
could, of course, be of great significance to sketch the developmental context
in which the pronouns—from “I” to “we” to “they”—take on their full
meaning in relation to the organ modes, the postural and sensory modalities,
and the space-time characteristics of world views.
As to the “we,” Freud went so far as to assert that “there is no doubt that
the tie which united each individual with Christ is also the cause of the tie
which unites them with one another” (1921), but then, as we saw, he did so in
a discourse on what he called “artificial” groups such as churches or armies.
The fact is, however, that all identifications amounting to brotherhoods and
sisterhoods depend on a joint identification with charismatic figures, from
parents to founders to gods. Wherefore the God above the Sinai, when asked
by Moses who he should tell the people had talked to him, introduced himself
as “I AM that I AM” and suggested that the people be told “I AM has sent me
unto you.” This existential meaning is, no doubt, central to the evolutionary
step of monotheism and extends to associated patriarchal and monarchic
phenomena (Erikson 1981).
Here we are again reminded of the lifelong power of the first mutual
recognition of the newborn and the primal (maternal) other and its eventual
transfer to the ultimate other who will “lift up His countenance upon you and
give you peace.” From here we could once more follow the stages of
development and study the way in which in given languages the fatherhoods
and motherhoods, the sisterhoods and brotherhoods of the “we” come to
share a joined identity experienced as most real. But here also it is necessary
to amend the very concept of a reality which, as I complained at the
beginning, is all too often seen as an “outerworld” to be adjusted to.
 THREEFOLD REALITY

The ego as concept and term was not, of course, invented by Freud. In
scholasticism it stood for the unity of body and soul, and in philosophy in
general for the permanency of conscious experience. William James (1920)
in his letters refers not only to an “enveloping ego to make continuous the
times and spaces,” but also speaks of “the ego’s active tension,” a term that
connotes the very essence of subjective health. Here, it seems, James (who
knew German intimately) thought of the subjective sense of “I” as well as the
unconscious workings of a built-in “ego.” But it is apparently one of the
functions of the ego’s unconscious work to integrate experience in such a way
that the I is assured a certain centrality in the dimensions of being: so that, (as
suggested), it can feel the flux of events like an effective doer rather than an
impotent sufferer. Active and originating rather than inactivated (a word to
be preferred to “passive,” for one can, as it were, be active in a passive
manner); centered and inclusive rather than shunted to the periphery;
selective rather than overwhelmed; aware rather than confounded: all of this
amounts to a sense of being at home in one’s time and place, and, somehow,
of feeling chosen even as one chooses.
So far, so good. But, as we noticed, when we follow human
development through the stages of life, the human problem is such that so
basic a sense of centrality depends for its renewal from stage to stage on an
increasing number of others: some of them close enough to be individually
acknowledged as an “other” in some important segment of life, but for the
most part a vague number of interrelated others who seek to confirm their
sense of reality by sharing, if not imposing it on ours, even as they also try to
delimit theirs against ours. It is for psychosocial reasons, then, that it is not
enough to speak of the ego’s adjustment to an outer reality. For, conflictual as
all human adaptation is, by the time the ego can be said to guide adaptation, it
has already absorbed adaptive experiences and introjected intense
identifications. In fact, Freud’s German model for reality, the word
Wirklichkeit (related as it is to what “works”) has pervasively active and
interactive connotations and should usually be translated as actuality and, I
think, understood to mean “mutual activation.”
Reality, then, must be said to have a number of indispensable
components. They are all dependent, in a psychoanalytic context, on an
instinctuality wherein, in contrast to the animal’s instinctivity, the affective
energies are put at the ego’s disposal during development and now work for
the immersion of maturing capacities in the phenomenal and communal
world. Thus, the child can be said to learn to “love” even facts that can be
named, verified, and shared, and that, in turn, inform such love.
As to the three indispensable components of a maturing sense of reality,
factuality is the most commonly emphasized in the usual sense of the “thing”
world of facts—to be perceived with a minimum of distortion or denial and a
maximum of the validation possible at a given stage of cognitive
development and at a given state of technology and science.
A second connotation of the word reality is a convincing coherence and
order that lifts the known facts into a context apt to make us (more or less
surprisingly) realize their nature: a truth value that can be shared by all those
who partake of a joint language and world image. “Comprehensibility”
(Begreiflichkeit, as used by Einstein) would seem to be a fitting word for
this aspect of reality.5 An alternative term is the more visual contextuality,
for it is the astounding interwovenness of the facts that gives them a certain
revelatory significance. And only by maintaining a meaningful
correspondence between such threefold reality and the main developmental
stages can the communal ethos secure for itself a maximum of energy from a
sufficient number of participants.
Reality as a viable world view, then (even if it is modestly called a
“Way of Life”) is at its best an all-inclusive conception that focuses
disciplined attention on a selection of certifiable facts: liberates a coherent
vision enhancing a sense of cont and actualizes an ethical fellowship with
strong work commitments.
World images, finally, must grow with each individual, even as they
must be renewed in each generation. We could now review our chapters,
from organ modes to postural and sensory modalities, and from the normative
crises of life to the antitheses of psychosocial development, and attempt to
indicate how world images tend to provide a universal context and meaning
for all such experiences. Only thus can the individual “I,” as it grows out of
the earliest bodily experiences—and out of that early instinctual development
that we call narcissistic—learn to have and to share a modicum of a sense of
orientation in the universe. Any study of world images, then, must begin with
every “I’s” needs for a basic space-time orientation and proceed to the
community’s ways of providing a network of corresponding perspectives,
such as the course of the day and the cycle of the year, the division of work
and the sharing of ritual events—up to the limits and “boundaries,” in K.
Erikson’s sense (1966), where outerness and otherness begin.
While I myself have been able to circumscribe such matters only in an
unsystematic manner (1974; 1977) as I was trying to sketch perspectives of
growing up in the American way of life, I am convinced that clinical
psychoanalytic observation can contribute essential insights into the deep
unconscious and preconscious involvement of each individual in established
and changing world images. For in all their built-in conflicts and destructive
antitheses we can study the potential complementarity of somatic, social, and
ego organization. Such study, in different historical settings, will be all the
more fruitful as psychoanalysis becomes more aware of its own history and
its ideological and ethical implications. But only a new kind of cultural
history can show how all the details of individual development dovetail with
or come to diverge from the grand schemes suggested in the existential cycles
of religious belief systems, in the historical postulates of political and
economic ideologies, and in the experiential implications of scientific
theories.

ETHOS AND ETHICS

The most comprehensive statement in early psychoanalysis on the

dynamic relation of ego and ethos is probably a passage in Freud’s New
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis:
 As a rule, parents and authorities analogous to them follow the precepts
of their own super-egos in educating children. . . . Thus a child’s super-
ego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its
parents’ super-ego; the contents which fill it are the same and it
becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgments
of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from
generation to generation (1933).

Here, as we see, Freud locates some aspects of the historical process

itself in the individual’s superego—that inner agency that exerts such
moralistic pressure on our inner life that the ego must defend itself against
it in order to be relatively free from paralyzing inner suppression. Freud
then spars briefly with the “materialistic views of history” that, he says,
emphasize political suppression by claiming that “human ‘ideologies’ are
nothing other than the product and superstructure of their contemporary
economic conditions”:

That is true, but very probably not the whole truth. Mankind never lives
entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of the race and of the
people, lives on in the ideologies of the super-ego, and yields only
slowly to the influences of the present and to new changes; and so long
as it operates through the super-ego it plays a powerful part in human
life, independently of economic conditions (Freud 1933, p. 67).

This statement has far-reaching implications for the psychological study

of revolutionary forces and methods; but most astonishingly it seems to
suggest that in reconstructing inner-personal dynamics the psychoanalyst
could and should note also the superego’s function as a vehicle of tradition,
and this especially in regard to its resistance to change and liberation—a
suggestion that opens major historical trends as reflected in inner conflicts to
direct psychoanalytic study. From a developmental point of view, however, I
would like to emphasize that what we detect in the superego as remnants of
the childhood years is, as Freud suggests, not only the reflection of living
ideologies, but also of old ones that have already become moralisms. For the
superego, a balancing of the imaginative oedipal stage and the infantile crisis
of initiative vs. guilt is apt to emphasize, above all, a network of
prohibitions that must fence in an all too playful initiative and help to
establish a basic moral or even moralistic orientation.
As I have indicated, I would then consider adolescence the life stage
wide open both cognitively and emotionally for new ideological imageries
apt to marshal the fantasies and energies of the new generation. Depending on
the historical moment, this will alternately confirm or protest the existing
order or promise a future one, more radical or more traditional, and thus help
to overcome identity confusion. Beyond this, however, we may allocate to
adulthood—exactly insofar as it has outgrown its excess of infantile
moralism or of adolescent ideologism—the potentiality of an ethical sense
consonant with the generative engagements of that stage and with the
necessity for a modicum of mature and far-reaching planning in accord with
historical reality. And here even revolutionary leaders must develop and
practice their ideologies both with a firm moral sense—and with ethical
concern. (As to our developmental insights, generative ethics would suggest
some such new version of the Golden Rule as: Do to another what will
advance the other’s growth even as it advances your own. [Erikson 1964]).
Here, and in passing, it may be good to remember that in outlining the
life stages just reserved for the ritualizations of man’s moral, ideological,
and ethical potentials—namely, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—we
warned of the corresponding dangers of three ritualisms: moralism, totalism,
and authoritism. Also, it may be good once more to recall the obligation to
visualize all developmental and generational factors epigenetically—to wit:

Thus, there are potentials for ethical and ideological traits in all morality,
even as there are both moral and ethical traits in ideology. Therefore,
continuing moral or ideological modes of thought in the ethical position are
by no means “infantile” or “juvenile” leftovers, as long as they retain the
potential for becoming integrated parts of a certain generative maturity within
the historical relativity of the times.

HISTORICAL RELATIVITY IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC

METHOD

As we in conclusion return once more to the basic psychoanalytic

method, we must remember its two inaleinable functions: it is a Hippocratic
undertaking that aims at freeing adults (whether patients or candidates for
training) from the oppressive and repressive anxieties of childhood and from
their influence on life and personality as already lived; and at the same time
it is a didactic as well as a research method that uniquely reveals some of
man’s fixations on past developments in phylogeny as well as in ontogeny. In
this connection it is interesting to note that a striving for an all-human
adulthood was part of last century’s ethos. Thus, in his 1844 manuscripts
Karl Marx claims that “just as all things natural must become, man, too, has
his act of becoming—history” (Tucker 1961). For “the act of becoming,”
Marx also uses the word Entstehungsakt, which connotes a combination of
an active “emerging,” “standing up,” and “becoming”; and there is the clear
implication of the coming maturity of the species. In a comparable utopian
statement, Freud said, “I may now add that civilization is a process in the
service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and
after that families, then races, peoples, and nations, into one great unity, the
unity of mankind” (1930). The implication that such a future demands an all-
human adulthood seems to pervade Freud’s systematic preoccupation with
man’s potentially fatal regressive tendencies toward infantile as well as
primitive and archaic affects and images; the human being of the future,
enlightened about all these “prehistorical” fixations, will perhaps have a
somewhat better chance to act as an adult and as a knowing participant in
one human specieshood. In our terms, this would imply that an adult mankind
would overcome pseudo- (or quasi-) speciation; that is, the splitting into
imaginary species that has provided adult rejectivity with a most moralistic
rationalization of the hate of otherness. Such “speciation” has supported the
most cruel and reactionary attributes of the superego where it was used to
reinforce the narrowest tribal consciousness, caste exclusiveness, and
nationalistic and racist identity, all of which must be recognized as
endangering the very existence of the species in a nuclear age.
The word Eros in this context once more underscores the fact that a
psychoanalytic theory begins with the assumption of all-embracing instinctual
forces that, at their best, contribute to a universal kind of love. But it also
once more underlines the fact that we have entirely neglected that other
unifying life principle, logos, that masters the cognitive structure of factuality
—a theme of such ever-increasing importance today, when technology and
science suggest, for the first time in human history, some outlines of a truly
universal and jointly planned physical environment. However, the world
suggested in the imagery of universal technology and apt to be dramatized by
the media can turn into a vision of a totally fabricated order to be planned
according to strictly logical and technological principles—a vision
dangerously oblivious of what we are emphasizing in these pages; namely,
the dystonic and antipathic trends endangering the organismic existence and
the communal order on which the ecology of psychic life depends. An art-
and-science of the human mind, however, must be informed by a
developmental, or shall we say life-historical, orientation, as well as by a
special historical self-awareness. As the historian Collingwood (1956) puts
it: “History is the life of the mind itself which is not mind except so far as it
both lives in the historical process and knows itself as so living.” These
words have always impressed me as applicable to the core of the
psychoanalytic method; and in preparation for Einstein’s Centenary I
attempted to formulate the way in which the psychoanalytic method of
investigation both permits and demands a systematic awareness of a specific
kind of relativity.
As to this very idea of relativity, all revolutionary advances in the
natural sciences, of course, have cognitive and ethical implications that at
first seem to endanger the previously dominant world image and with it the
very cosmic reassurances of the basic dimensions of a sense of “I.” Thus, to
give only one example, Copernicus upset man’s (as well as the earth’s)
central position in the universe that, no doubt, had been an arrangement
supported by and in support of every I’s natural sense of centeredness. But
eventually, such multiple enlightenment as comes with a radical reorientation
also reaffirms the adaptive power of the human mind and thus stimulates a
more rational central and inventive ethos. Relativity, too, at first had
unbearably relativistic implications, seemingly undermining the foundations
of any firm human “standpoint”; and yet, it opens a new vista in which
relative standpoints are “reconciled” to each other in fundamental in
variance.
Comparably, Freud could pride himself on assigning to human
consciousness a peripheral position on the very border of the “id,” a
cauldron of drives, for the energy of which (in a century most cognizant of
nature’s energy transformations) he claimed an “equal dignity.” Now, as I
pointed out in my Centenary address (1980b) Einstein and Freud themselves
mistrusted each other’s methods. Yet, it appears—or it appeared to me—that
the principle of relativity, or, at any rate, one of Einstein’s favorite
illustrations of it (namely, the relation of two moving railroad cars to each
other) can be applied to Freud’s basic method.
The psychoanalytic situation, I claimed, can be reviewed in terms that
picture the psychoanalyst’s and the patient’s minds at work as two
“coordinate systems” moving relatively to each other. The seeming repose
and impersonality of the psychoanalytic encounter actually permit and
intensify in the patient a “free floating” of “associations” that can move about
with varying speed through the distant past, or the immediate present, to the
feared or wished-for future, and, at the same time, in the spheres of concrete
experience, fantasy, and dream life. The patient suffers from symptoms
betraying some arrest in the present and yet related to developmental
fixations on one or more of the core pathologies characteristic of earlier
stages of life. Free association, therefore, can be expected to induce the
analysand to remember and to relive, if often in symbolically disguised form,
conflicts intrinsic to previous stages and states of development. Their whole
significance, however, often does not become clear until the patient reveals
in his fantasies and thoughts a “transference” on the psychoanalyst’s person
of some of the revived and more or less irrational images and affects of
earlier and earliest life periods.
The psychoanalyst, in turn, has undergone a “training psychoanalysis”
that has taught him a kind of perpetual, but (at its best) disciplined and
unobtrusive, awareness of his own mind’s wanderings through
developmental and historical time. Thus, while viewing the patient’s
verbalizations in the light of what has been learned of the general direction of
his or her life, the psychoanalyst remains consistently ready to become aware
of the way in which the patient’s present state and past conflicts reverberate
in his or her own life situation and evoke feelings and images from the
corresponding stages of the past—in brief, the therapist’s
“countertransference.” Such complex interplay is not only enlightening, it
also helps to detect (and to learn from) any possible unconscious collusion of
the listener’s own habitual fantasies and denials with those of the patient.
But while thus moving about in their respective life cycles, relative as
they both are to different social and historical trends, the practitioner’s
interpretive thoughts are also moving with the past and current
conceptualizations of psychoanalysis: including, of course, the analyst’s own
“generational” position between his or her own training analysis and other
influential training personalities and schools; as well as his or her own
intellectual ruminations, intrinsically related as they are to one’s
development as a worker and as a person. And each old or new clinical and
theoretical model or “map” can, as we saw, be marked by significant shifts in
clinical ethos.
Only by having learned to remain potentially—and, as I said,
unobtrusively—aware of the relativity governing all these related movements
can the psychoanalyst hope to reach healing and enlightening insights that
may lead to interpretations fitting the therapeutic moment. Such
interpretations are often equally surprising, in their utter uniqueness and in
their human lawfulness, to both practitioner and client. In thus clarifying the
patient’s course of life in the light of the given therapeutic encounter,
interpretation heals through an expansion of developmental and historical
insight.
And so I had the temerity to relate Einstein’s and my own field, as each
participant was asked to do, at the Centenary celebration in Jerusalem. It
seemed to me that some such approach is an intrinsic part of a new method of
observation that makes age-old empathy systematic and establishes a lawful
interplay not otherwise accessible. As to its special clinical application, it is
guided by a modern caritas that takes it for granted that the healer and the to-
be-healed in principle share—and can share most actually—the invariant
laws of human motivation as revealed by the relativities observed. At the
same time, however, it is part of a new kind of life-historical and historical
awareness that demands to be integrated into the ethos of modern man:
whether it be intensely professionalized as in healing procedures, part of the
workings of some related fields such as hitory, sociology, or political
science, or indeed, simply entering gradually the insight of daily life.

This book began with some notes on my training in Vienna and

especially on the spirit of the therapeutic enterprise. I think that I can best
conclude by referring once more to the international congress of
psychoanalysts in 1979 in New York. There, in addition to speaking on
generativity (1980(c)) I also participated in a panel discussion on the
relationship of transference and life cycle. The members of the panel were
Peter Neubauer, Peter Blos, and Pearl King who, respectively, spoke on
patterns of transference in children, in adolescents, and in adults—including
the middle aged and the elderly (P. Blos; P. New-bauer; P. King; 1980). I can
offer here only a few comments in line with our deliberations.
The classical difference between the psychoanalytic situation.
encountered in work with adults and with children has of course been the fact
that children, in their immaturity of personality, are unable to recline and to
introspect systematically. If anything, they want to interact, to play, and to
converse. And so they prove unable to develop systematic transferences, not
to speak of that artifact called “transference neurosis” that marks, most
instructively, adult treatment. Now, it has always seemed to be a bit of adult
chauvinism to complain about the inability of children to develop
transference neuroses. How could they, and why should they, immersed as
they are in experiencing the present and in trying to translate it into a playful
self-expression with multiple learning functions. As for their infantile
attachments, Anna Freud once remarked that the first edition is simply not
sold out yet; otherwise she speaks only of “different transference reactions”
(A. Freud, 1980, p. 2). And while there can be only occasional
“transferences” of persistent symbiotic needs for early parental figures, it
must be remembered that children must continue to learn to use other selected
adults, be they grandparents or neighbors, doctors, or teachers, for much-
needed extraparental encounters. Thus, what is sometimes monotonously
referred to as the child patient’s search for “object-relations” (that is, for a
fully deserving and responding recipient of one’s love) must come to include
that clarified mutuality of involvement on which the life of generations
depends. A child patient, in fact, may well be ready to comprehend
something of the role of the analyst, or what Neubauer significantly calls the
link between transient transference relations and a working alliance with
the analyst. But could one not see another adult chauvinistic trend in the fact
that in the discussion of transference in psychoanalytic work with children
and adolescents we rarely consider in serious detail our unavoidable
countertransference either in relation to the youngsters or, indeed, their
parents?
What has been said about childhood appears in new and dramatic forms
in adolescence. True, sexual maturation is now under way, but there is again
a planned delay (we have called it a psychosocial latency) both in
personality development and in social status that permits a period of
experimentation with social roles by regressive recapitulations as well as
experimental anticipations, often aggravated by an alternation of extremes.
And again, the evolutionary logic of this is apparent in the fact that
adolescence can lead to a psychosocial identity only as it finds its own
outlines in “confirmations” and in gradual commitments to rudimentary
friendship, love, partnership, and ideological association—in whatever
order. Peter Blos speaks forcefully not only of a regression in the service of
development but also of a second individuation process. As for the
corresponding transference, Blos describes how “the adolescent patient
actively constitutes, so to say, remodeled parental images; he thus creates
ingenuously corrected new editions of old scripts via the analyst’s presence
as a real person” (1980). This obviously assigns to the analyst of adolescents
the double position of one who heals by well-dosed interpretation and yet is
also committed to the role of a generative model of cautious affirmation—a
mentor, then. The patient’s second individuation, in turn, must also mean a
gradual capacity for friendships and associations that denote a respect for
and recognition of the individuation of others and a mutual actualization of
and by them.
As to the transferences evident in adult patients, however, it must once
more be remembered that adults in general, unlike children and adolescents,
must submit to the classical treatment setting. For it forces on the patient—as
we can now appreciate in detail—a specific combination of (1) a supine
position throughout (remember the importance of the upright posture in human
encounters); (2) an avoidance of facial confrontation and of all eye-to-eye
contact (remember the decisive importance of mutual recognition by glance
and smile); (3) an exclusion of conversational give and take (remember the
importance of conversation for a mutual delineation of the “I”); and, finally,
(4) the endurance of the analyst’s silence. All of this provokes ingeniously a
nostalgic search through memory and transference for early infantile
counterplayers. No wonder that the patient has to be relatively healthy (that
is, reasonably tolerant of all these frustrations) to undergo such a cure. At the
same time, of course, this whole arrangement imposes on the analyst an
investiture with a healing authority that cannot be without influence on the
countertransference and thus doubly demands analytic insight.
When discussing adults, Pearl King moved decisively to middle age—
and beyond. There, she points out, individuals live by a variety of time
standards: chronological, biological, and psychological. This threesome
corresponds pretty well to our Ethos, Soma, and Psyche: for it is the Ethos
that projects its values on chronological time, while Soma remains master of
the biological, and Psyche of the experienced time. Of special interest for us
(who in these pages began our stagewise approach with the last stage) is
Pearl King’s description of a reversal of transference in advanced years,
which she formulates thus: “The analyst can be experienced in the
transference as any significant figure from the patient’s past, sometimes
covering a span of five generations, and for any of these transference figures
the roles may be reversed, so that the patient behaves to the analyst as he felt
he was treated by them” (1980). And King does not omit the complex
counter-transference in relation to elderly patients: “The affects, whether
positive or negative, that may accompany such transference phenomena are
often very intense with older patients, and they may arouse unacceptable
feelings in the analyst toward his own aging parents. It is therefore necessary
for those undertaking the psychoanalysis of such patients to have come to
terms with their own feelings about their own parents and to have accepted in
a healthy, self-integrative way their own stage in their life cycle and their
own aging process” (p. 185). King also suggests, as already mentioned, that
it is often difficult for aging patients to contemplate a conclusion of their
treatment: for then, it seems, they will be obliged to face the authority of the
seemingly merciless process of time on its own terms.
 In all stages of life, then, the patients’ varying forms of transference
seem to represent an attempt to involve the analyst as a generative being in
the repetition of selected life crises in order to restore a previously broken
developmental dialogue. The dynamics of this clinical encounter of the
generations, however, can obviously not be fully clarified except by a study
of the typical experiences of the psychoanalyst’s countertransference in
relation to patients of different ages. For, to quote myself, “only by remaining
consistently open to the way in which the patient’s present as well as past
stages reverberate in the analyst’s experience of the corresponding stages can
the psychoanalyst become more fully aware of the generational implications
of psychoanalytic work.” I emphasize this in conclusion because I think that
in these matters it would be rewarding to compare the interplay of
transferences and countertransferences between analysands and analysts of
given sexes and ages in different cultural and historical settings. Freud’s
revolutionary decision to make this interplay of transferences the central
issue in the healing situation has made of psychoanalysis, clinical and
“applied,” the prime method for the study of the developmental and
historical relativity in human experience. And only such study can confirm
what is, indeed, invariantly human.
These concluding remarks on the basic psychoanalytic situation can do
no more than illustrate what was said at the very beginning of this essay;
namely, that to see what is most familiar in our daily work in terms of
relativity (as well as complementarity) may do better justice to some aspects
of psychoanalysis than some of the causal and quantitative terms that were of
the essence to the theories of the founders. At any rate, it is evident that a
psychosocial orientation fuses naturally with such a developmental and
historical view, and that clinical observations made with such awareness in
dealing with patients of different ages in different areas of the world can in
the very process of healing serve to register the fate of the basic human
strengths and core disturbances under changing technological and historical
conditions. Thus, clinical work can supplement other ways of taking the
pulse of changing history and in advancing an all-human awareness.
5 Einstein once said chat to “comprehend a bodily object” means to attributetence” to it. And he adds
“the fact that the world of sense experiences is con is a miracle” (1954).
 5

The Ninth Stage

INTRODUCTION

WHEN THE EIGHT stages were initially charted, it seemed obvious that
apart from the infant’s arrival date such variety exists in the timing of human
development that no age specifications could be validated for each stage
independent of social criteria and pressures.
While this is also true of old age, it is useful to delineate a specific time
frame in order to focus on the life experiences and crises of the period. Old
age in one’s eighties and nineties brings with it new demands, reevaluations,
and daily difficulties. These concerns can only be adequately discussed, and
confronted, by designating a new ninth stage to clarify the challenges. We
must now see and understand the final life cycle stages through late-eighty-
and ninety-year-old eyes.
Even the best cared-for bodies begin to weaken and do not function as
they once did. In spite of every effort to maintain strength and control, the
body continues to lose its autonomy. Despair, which haunts the eighth stage,
is a close companion in the ninth because it is almost impossible to know
what emergencies and losses of physical ability are imminent. As
independence and control are challenged, self-esteem and confidence
weaken. Hope and trust, which once provided firm support, are no longer the
sturdy props of former days. To face down despair with faith and appropriate
humility is perhaps the wisest course.
As I review the life cycle, and I have been doing so for a long time, I
realize that the eight stages are most often presented with the syntonic
quotient mentioned first, followed by the dystonic element second—e.g., trust
vs. mistrust; autonomy vs. shame and doubt, etc. The syntonic supports
growth and expansion, offers goals, celebrates self-respect and commitment
of the very finest. Syntonic qualities sustain us as we are challenged by the
more dystonic elements with which life confronts us all. We should recognize
the fact that circumstances may place the dystonic in a more dominant
position. Old age is inevitably such a circumstance. In writing “The Ninth
Stage,” I have therefore placed the dystonic element first in order to
underscore its prominence and potency. In either case, it is important to
remember that conflict and tension are sources of growth, strength, and
commitment.
With the chart of the stages well in mind, and perhaps helpfully before
you, let us review stage by stage what the aged individual faces of the
syntonic and dystonic elements and the tensions with which he or she must
cope. Let us face the disturbing dystonic potentials of the stages and give
them full attention and consideration as they appear to individuals in the ninth
stage.

BASIC MISTRUST VS. TRUST: HOPE

Lucky the infants who come into this world with good genes, loving
parents, and even grandparents who readily relate to them enthusiastically
and enjoy them hugely. We must acknowledge the fact that without basic trust
the infant cannot survive. It follows that every living person has basic trust
and with it, to some degree, the strength of hope. Basic trust is the
confirmation of hope, our consistent buttress against all the trials and so-
called tribulations of life in this world. Although survival would be difficult
without a modicum of mistrust to protect us, mistrust can contaminate all
aspects of our lives and deprive us of love and fellowship with human
beings.
Elders are forced to mistrust their own capabilities. Time takes its toll
even on those who have been healthy and able to maintain sturdy muscles,
and the body inevitably weakens. Hope may easily give way to despair in the
face of continual and increasing disintegration, and in light of both chronic
and sudden indignities. Even the simple activities of daily living may present
difficulty and conflict. No wonder elders become tired and often depressed.
Yet ciders readily accept that the sun goes down at night and rejoice to see it
rise brightly every morning. While there is light, there is hope, and who
knows what bright light and revelation any morning may bring?

SHAME AND DOUBT VS. AUTONOMY: WILL

Surely all parents remember how, when their children were quite young,
two years of age or so, they became surprisingly willful, grasping spoons and
toys, ready to stand up on their own feet. Their stance is playful but firm and
self-satisfying. They will to do, and they demonstrate that they can. The
stronger the will, the more they undertake. Since growth happens so fast and
with such satisfaction, parents can only wonder and hope for their success.
But there are limits; when these are overstepped and things get out of control,
there may be a reversion to insecurity and a lack of self-confidence that ends
in shame and doubt in their capacities.
Something of this doubt returns to elders as they no longer trust in their
autonomy over their bodies and life choices. Will becomes weakened, though
held in check enough to provide some security and to avoid the shame of lost
self-control. One wills what is safe and sound, and nothing is quite safe, for
sure.
Autonomy. Remember how it feels, how it always felt, to want
everything your way. I suspect this drive continues to our last breath. When
you were young, all the elders were stronger and more powerful; now the
powerful are younger than you. When you are feisty and stubborn about
arrangements made for or about you, all the more powerful elements—
doctors, lawyers, and your own grown children—get into the act. They may
well be right, but it can make you feel rebellious. Shame and doubt challenge
cherished autonomy.

GUILT VS. INITIATIVE: PURPOSE

To initiate suggests a moving out into a new direction. It may be a lonely

trip and still be successful, or it may be a move that catches the interest and
participation of others. Initiative is brave and valiant, but when it misfires, a
strong sense of deflation follows. It is lively and enthusiastic while it lasts,
but the initiative instigator is often left with a sense of inadequacy and guilt.
Elders who took leadership seriously early in life may in later years
shun the guilt that accompanies overzealous initiative. While once you were
full of creative ideas, at eighty plus it’s all memorable enthusiasm. At a
distance it seems too much and not centered. The sense of purpose and the
enthusiasm are dulled; there is plenty to do in just keeping up with a slow,
constant, demanding pace. Guilt raises its ugly head when an elder is too bent
in carrying out some project that seems utterly satisfying and appealing—but
only personally.

INFERIORITY VS. INDUSTRY: COMPETENCE

Industry and competence are aptitudes we all know about in this

competitive country, this land of the free and home of the innovative. What
are you good at, what are you good for are the first queries of a fellow human
being. Our schools start us off that way, and we seldom recover the
playfulness that led into original creativity. We all are graded on our
competence.
 Writing is a good example of our evaluation of competence. One may
have splendid ideas, perhaps even the capacity to illustrate a new version of
an old idea, but without the competence to write clearly and speak
accurately, one would surely be classified as incompetent. In truth everything
one does or attempts to do demands a standard of competence in order to be
acceptable and understandable. It is not necessary to be original or inventive,
but it is mandatory to be competent in order to excel in our practical world.
The industry that was a driving force when you were in your forties is a
memory you may hardly recall. You were so proud of your competence. Such
energy! That urgency is gone, and very likely that’s a blessing because you
really don’t have enough strength for the pace you set then. But when the
challenge pushes you on, you are forced to accept your inadequacy. Not to be
competent because of aging is belittling. We become like unhappy small
children of great age.

IDENTITY CONFUSION VS. IDENTITY: FIDELITY

Identity marks, acclaims, and distinguishes each infant at birth and is

immediately confirmed by naming. A boy gets a boy’s name, and likewise a
girl’s name pronounces her to be female. There are any number of names that
we can then respond to or disavow. The greatest problem we encounter is
who we think we are vs. who others may think we are or are trying to be.
Who does he or she think I am? is a troublesome question to ask oneself, and
it is difficult to find the appropriate answer.
We play roles, of course, and try out for parts we wish we could play
for real, especially as we explore in adolescence. Costumes and makeup may
sometimes be persuasive, but in the long run it is only having a genuine sense
of who we are that keeps our feet on the ground and our heads up to an
elevation from which we can see clearly where we are, what we are, and
what we stand up for.
To be confused about this existential identity makes you a riddle to
yourself and to many, perhaps even most, other people. With aging, you may
feel a real uncertainty about status and role. By what names in your old age
do you wish to be called? How independent can you afford to be? Who are
you at eighty-five and beyond, when compared with who you were at
midlife? Your role is unclear when compared with the firmness of your
earlier stance and purpose. In fact, you may be confused about what role,
what position you are supposed to take in this period when older values are
suddenly vague and crumbling.

ISOLATION VS. INTIMACY: LOVE

The years of intimacy and love are bright and full of warmth and
sunlight. To love and find oneself in another is to bring fulfillment and
delight. Adding offspring to the circle is joyous enrichment. To see them
grow and become qualified to take hold of their own lives is wonderful and
gratifying.
Everyone is not so lucky and so blessed. A sense of isolation and
deprivation attacks those for whom this rich period is not realized. The aging
elder may no doubt feel very isolated and left out if life has not brought him
or her such riches to remember and relish. If in old age no such memories are
tucked away for reevoking with photograph or remembered story, there
instead may be a total devotion to art, literature, or scholarship to offset these
losses. Some individuals are happily and completely devoted to their work,
their calling and creativity.
All elders in the ninth stage may be unable to depend on the ways in
which they are used to relating with others. How one typically engages and
makes contact with others may be overshadowed by new incapacities and
dependencies. Older individuals may need to initiate interaction more often
since others may feel insecure or uncomfortable, unsure of how to “break the
ice.” Awkwardness, resulting from confusion about how to interact with
someone who is not “like everybody else,” may leave many elders deprived
of potential connection and intimate exchange. To add to the confusion, an
elder’s community of others may shrink or expand depending on
circumstance; at the very least it will change frequently.

STAGNATION VS. GENERATIVITY: CARE

The stage of generativity claims the longest stretch of time on the chart
—thirty years or more, during which one establishes a working commitment
and perhaps begins a new family, devoting time and energy to furthering its
healthy and productive life. During this period work and family relationships
confront one with the duties of caretaking and a widening range of
obligations and responsibilities, interests, and celebrations. When this is
satisfactorily cohesive, all can go well and prosper. It’s a wonderful time to
be alive, cared for and caring, surrounded by those nearest and dearest. It is
challenging, exciting at best, though burdensome if rigid and demanding. One
may also become involved in the community and many of its diverse
activities. This involvement can be inundating, but it is never dull.
Toward the end of this demanding period one may feel an urge to
withdraw somewhat, only to experience a loss of the stimulus of belonging,
of being needed. At eighty or ninety one may begin to have less energy, less
capacity to adjust quickly to the abruptness of the changes being imposed by
the busy bodies all around. Generativity, which comprised the major life
involvement of active individuals, is no longer necessarily expected in old
age. This releases elders from the assignment of caretaking. However, not
being needed may be felt as a designation of uselessness. When no
challenges are offered, a sense of stagnation may well take over. Others, of
course, may welcome this as a promise of respite, but if one should
withdraw altogether from generativity, from creativity, from caring for and
with others entirely, that would be worse than death.
 DESPAIR AND DISGUST VS. INTEGRITY: WISDOM

In our final definition of “wisdom” we claim that wisdom rests in the

capacity to see, look, and remember, as well as to listen, hear, and remember.
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.
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 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.
A 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. I am persuaded that if
elders can come to terms with the dystonic elements in their life experiences
in the ninth stage, they may successfully make headway on the path leading to
gerotranscendence.

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 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.
* Childhood and Society, p. 269.
 6

Old Age and Community

ONE OF THE delightful experiences of elders is to have forthright

conversations with grandchildren. As I picked blueberries with Christopher
one sunny day down on the Cape, we congratulated ourselves on the dandy
job we were doing. He could effectively clear the lower branches within his
reach, while I was busy with the upper levels of the bushes. No berries
eluded us, and our baskets were getting very full. After a while I did need to
sit down on a rock and rest a bit, but not he. He continued for a moment or so
and then stood up very straight in front of me to clarify essentials. “Nama,”
he said, “you are old and I am new”—an unchallengeable pronouncement.
In our country useless old things, as we know, are taken to the dump. We
have, however, introduced “recycling,” which extends the usefulness of old
objects for a while and keeps us from overburdening the land with enduring
deposits of debris. We don’t take our old folks to the dump, but we certainly
don’t do enough toward their recycling. What if we could make available to
elders better eye care, more eyeglasses, and more hearing aids and provide
them with large-print magazines and papers, as well as large-print books?
All health care advisers promote exercise, at least regular walking
schedules, to maintain health, and mobility. But few towns and cities
maintain safe sidewalks and streets where elders can move slowly and
cautiously. Have you ever seen a town in this country where occasional
benches are provided so that an elderly shopper can take a breather or relax
a moment in the process of carrying home the shopping bag or bundle?
 As my life proceeds into the misnamed area of the eighth and last stages,
I begin to wonder about the unexpected experiences and observations that
consistently confront me. The usual attitude toward elders in our society is
bewildering. While historical, anthropological, and religious documents
record that long-lived elders of ancient times were applauded and even
revered, this century’s response to aged individuals is often derision, words
of contempt, and even revulsion. If help is offered, it tends to be overdone.
Pride is wounded, and respect is in jeopardy. The aged are offered a totally
playless second childhood. If an elder can’t climb stairs readily or weaves
as he or she walks, this misfortune is equated with a loss of thinking and
remembering. It is often easier to give in to these verdicts than to defy them.
The deaf and blind have found some ways to cope with their deprivations
and to maintain their human right to live out their lives in the privacy of their
own feelings, judgment, and pace. They have profited from fine institutions
dedicated to their support.
Suppose that you have learned that knowing yourself is true wisdom and
opens your ears and eyes. How does that knowledge alone prepare you for
the last long trek to death’s door? What does our society do to facilitate the
transitions of the last life cycle stages and to adapt to the presence of elders?
The whole population is growing older. There are more people over eighty
than ever before, and medicine is making great strides to increase the life-
span. As yet, however, no program of how to incorporate elders into our
society and living arrangements has been adequately envisioned and
designed.
When, in this country and especially in our crowded cities, we began to
consider how we could support and care for our elders, we made a giant step
forward. It was clear that elders often need twenty-four-hour care. A few
residential care facilities were undertaken within city limits, but cities are
crowded and noisy, and the air is polluted. Some effort was made to find
appropriate housing in the suburbs. That was an improvement, but soon it
became obvious that land outside town and suburbia was plentiful, cheaper,
and in many ways more practical. Large areas were appropriated, carefully
laid out, and built up. Many of these developments are set in beautiful
surroundings and offer thoughtfully planned schedules of entertainment as
well as excellent care and supervision. The places selected for such
facilities often include beautiful trees and ponds, making charming short
walks available for “inmates.” That these homes for the elderly are planned
to serve their needs in every way is obvious, and thus beyond debate and
criticism, except that the cost is high, much too high for most.
In general we find that the larger the residential facility, the more
specialized and segregated the staff becomes. Many must be on call all night.
Vacations and overworking of staff often result in high rates of turnover
followed by the initial ineptness of new help. Since most of the personnel
live outside the compound, large parking areas often surround the whole
enterprise. Trucks bring food and drink, office equipment, clothing, and
entertainment. Hairdressers come by schedule, as do foot specialists,
dentists, manicurists, and masseurs. The kitchen staff arrives and departs; the
serving staff likewise, and the cleaning contingent functions early in order to
be ready to receive “inmates” and guests. In this regard a facility is run like a
big hotel. There are activity programs daily under the auspices of the
activities director or committee. Sabbath services and special events and
holidays are regularly planned by the staff. Probably “inmates” have an
opportunity to convey their hopes and wishes for special activities; bingo is
often very popular. There is an enormous diversity of activity and time spent
on caretaking and quality. The fact that so much good work is accomplished
is remarkable and commendable.
Then there are the elders, for whom all this was devised, and their
doctors and nurses. The elders may be slowed-down, insecure, or
temporarily helpless. Many need wheelchairs, walkers, or canes; some are
incontinent; some have dietary problems; many have broken, unhealed bones.
These are fragile communities at best. Continuity of interrelationships and
daily functioning are continually threatened by any and all unexpected
breakdowns in the systemic “machinery” and by shifts in the population of
the served and the serving.
Something is terribly wrong. Why has it been necessary to send our
elders “out of this world” into some facility so remote in order to live out
their lives in physical care and comfort? Every human being is headed for
old age, with all its joys and sorrows. But how can we learn from our elders
how to prepare for the end of life, which we all must face alone, if our role
models do not live among us? One solution, though probably only a dream,
would be for every city to have parks—fine, well-guarded parks—available
to all. In the middle of each park could be a residence for elders. When able,
they could take short walks or rides in wheelchairs within the park with their
relatives and close friends, who could also visit, sit, and talk with them on
terraces and decks. We all could speak to them and hear their stories,
learning what they still have to offer of their wisdom.
Let’s say we have made it through the eighth stage with major and minor
losses of friends and relatives. Physical strength and capacities have slowly
but inevitably let us down. Most of us have not been living in close contact
with friends or relatives who have lived into their nineties, so we have not
fully shared their experience of what life becomes in the ninth stage. How
can we plan or imagine how to conform to this unknown future and make it as
rich, meaningful, and stimulating as possible? With what stories of successful
aging do we alert and inform ourselves on our way? Perhaps elders over
ninety should meet together to compare new experiences and make enjoyable
short-range plans. They should share some of the benefits and satisfactions of
feeling free to let involvement with the youth of the world slacken and
become less attractive.
I remember seeing older men in the streets of southern Europe sitting on
benches outside their houses, smoking pipes, chatting and joking, watching
the world go by. The women were indoors, gossiping probably; they speak
another language from the men, though they surely enjoy it equally well
spiced. In China, India, and Tibet, we are informed, the old wise men often
settle into caves and enjoy whatever nourishment their younger admirers and
students bring them. Solitude does not dismay them, and visits inspire,
strengthen, and make life worthwhile.
In our northern Arctic wilds, appropriate patterns have been devised. If
Eskimos travel to distant areas as communities in order to find better hunting
or fishing, they set out with sleds and dogs, equipment, and enough food for
all. No stopping for any length of time is possible; the cold is cruel. Should
an aged one not be able to keep up, an igloo must be fashioned with ice—big
enough for one. He or she will be settled in and left behind. That person will
understand and know in advance that this is a potential farewell and will
probably wish it so. To freeze to death is better than to hold back and
jeopardize the whole community. No doubt people prepare throughout their
lives for this eventuality. Where this necessity is understood, elders are
celebrated and revered. All can take part in venerating the occasion and the
elder. In our culture we perhaps don’t have enough faith and trust in the
community to dedicate such dignified and honoring celebrations of passage.
We seem to have no appropriate word, gesture, song, or stance for that
final farewell, though we all seem to know that grievous dirge:

You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley

You’ve got to cross it by yourself
There ain’t no one going to cross it for you
You’ve got to cross it by yourself.

Must we be so dull and dreary? What about all the animals and all the
sentient creatures that died as you were dying? With no more hunger to fear,
wouldn’t we be ready to share that valley with all: running, crawling,
standing, flying, dancing, making appropriate sounds of release, laughter,
bellowing, singing, fearless and curious, free and transcendent?
In the past year I have had the opportunity to be with and observe a
number of older people who are not up to “making it” in family life in
general. They need the special care and help of a nursing facility. I observe
with what difficulty they walk, even with the support of canes and walkers,
how awkward standing up straight is, how precarious sitting down has
become. The spring, the rhythm have left their bodies. Falling down is a
perpetual threat with its hazard of getting hurt and its challenge, both
awkward and demoralizing, of getting up again from way down on the floor.
How they manage is a constant wonder—a caution to younger people who
are facing life’s trials and troubles more advantageously.
Where in limited, repetitive, daily lives do these “retired” and resigned
elders find refreshment and stimulus, some joy or the nurturing of soul and
sense necessary for survival? Surely the spectacular beauty of nature and
changing seasons, in matters both large and small, consistently surprises and
stimulates us all. The arts have always played their role; beauty, song, and
the response of all the senses remain and can be counted on, called upon, and
absorbed. Religious groups offer and provide abiding support to their
members and the needy who seek them out. Families do what they can to
support ongoing relationships; they extend what help and warmth are
possible. When distance precludes their involvement, organizations such as
Hospice move in vigorously to the rescue of the isolated who let their needs
be known.
What, we may ask, would be a special approach to look to for relating
with elders? How can we express more grace and refined acuity than we
often are able to muster for the meeting of hearts, senses, and minds? In one
way we have practically known the answer without actually understanding its
meaning. When we are faced with a really troublesome problem, we
sometimes resort to putting the matter “in the hands of” those more
knowledgeable than ourselves. That is of course precisely what an ideal
health care institution offers: hands, understanding, capable, talented hands,
which have had careful training and much experience in communication with
those who are limited in their modes of expressing needs. “In the hands of”—
nothing could state more clearly what the importance of hands is and must be
for patients everywhere. Conscious and attentive use of the hands would
make all our lives more meaningful in the care and comfort of relationships
with patients who feel isolated and somewhat abandoned. Hands are
essential for vital involvement in living.
I am persuaded that if retired elders could have regular, if not daily,
massage, it would be amazingly beneficial, refreshing, and relaxing. We need
to be mindful of the distinction between maintenance touch—that is, touch in
the service of hygiene and management (e.g., wiping, lifting, feeding)—and
communicative touch—that is, touch in the service of human connection (e.g.,
rubbing the back and shoulders, holding a hand). Even maintenance touch can
be provided with a respectful and humanizing regard that leaves patients
feeling that they are being treated as people, not as objects to be tidied and
transported.
 7

Gerotranscendence

IN THE PURSUIT of following how aged people face the deterioration of

their bodies and faculties, gerotricians have begun to use the word
“transcendence” to describe a state that some aging persons develop and
retain. Let me quote, to begin, the definition of the word
“gerotranscendence” presented by Lars Tornstam and fellow workers at
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden:

With points of departure from our own studies as well as from theories
and observations from others . . . we suggest that human aging, the very
process of living into old age, encompasses a general potential towards
gerotranscendence. Simply put, ’gerotranscendence is a shift in meta
perspective, from a materialistic and rational vision to a more cosmic
and transcendent one, normally followed by an increase in life
satisfaction. Depending on the definition of “religion,” the theory of
gerotranscendence may or may not be regarded as a theory of religious
development. In a study of terminal patients Nystrom and Andersson-
Segesten (1990) found a condition, peace of mind, in some of the
patients. This condition is in many ways close to our concept of
gerotranscendence. They did not, however, find any correlation between
this state of mind and the existence of a religious belief or religious
practice in the patients. Regardless of this, the patients had or had not
reached the state of peace of mind. . . . As in Jung’s theory of the
 individuation process, gerotranscendence is regarded as the final stage
in a natural process towards maturation and wisdom. It defines a reality
somewhat different from the normal mid-life reality which
gerontologists tend to project on old age. According to the theory, the
gerotranscendent individual experiences a new feeling of cosmic
communion with the spirit of the universe, a redefinition of time, space,
life and death, and a redefinition of the self. This individual might also
experience a decrease in interest in material things and a greater need
for solitary “meditation.”*

These theorists continue this discussion with comments of various

gerontologists, the contributions of Zen Buddhist theory, and other
contributors from a variety of disciplines.
The statement in the quoted report describes what the gerotranscendent
individual experiences—namely:

1. “There is new feeling of cosmic communion with the spirit of the

universe,” regarding which I refer the reader to Lewis Thomas’s The
Lives of a Cell.
2. Time is circumscribed to now, or maybe next week, for probably
anyone over ninety; beyond that the vista is misty.
3. Space has slowly decreasing dimensions within the radius of our
physical capabilities.
4. Death becomes syntonic, the way of all living things.
5. One’s sense of self expands to include a wider range of interrelated
others.

“Transcendence” is a word one is reluctant to use freely, for it has the

tone, the imprint of the special, the holy. According to the dictionary, “to
transcend” simply means “to rise above or go beyond a limit, exceed, excel”;
also “to go beyond the universe and time.” “Transcendence” has placed itself
in the domain of religion, where it is on holy ground and protected from
casual usage. That the word is used in all religions is unsurprising since it
covers an area passing human knowledge, while expressing the hopes and
expectations of all true believers.
 Historians of earlier epochs present evidence of how in the Orient the
aged were held in high esteem for long lives of service and good judgment.
Wise elders were applauded for leaving the bustle of community life,
retreating into the mountains and remote places to live out their lives. Though
the retreat may have been lonely, it did not cost them self-respect, and many
were fed and cared for adequately enough to allow for years of retirement. I
am told that even spiritual leaders in many areas of the world have
responded with physical withdrawal from the overbusy schedules of
monasteries and convents.
Perhaps the really old find a safe place to consider their states of being
only in privacy and solitude. After all, how else can one find peace and
acceptance of the changes that time imposes on mind and body? The race and
competition are over and done with; to release oneself from hurry and
tension is mandatory in old age. Some learn this early, and some too late.
This type of “withdrawal,” in which one deliberately retreats from the
usual engagements of daily activity, is consciously chosen withdrawal. Such
a stance does not necessarily imply a lack of vital involvement; there may be
continued involvement despite disengagement—as Erik says, a “deeply
involved, disinvolvement.” This paradoxical state does seem to exhibit a
transcendent quality, a “shift . . . from a materialistic and rational vision.”
However, when withdrawal and retreat are motivated by a disdain for life
and others, it is unlikely that such peace of mind and transcendence will be
experienced.
Fortunate are those who have the luxury to choose to withdraw. Many
elders are faced with enforced withdrawals. Physical deterioration of eyes,
ears, teeth, bones, all the body’s systems often inflicts an inevitable reduction
in contact with others and the outside world. Emotional and psychological
responses to decline may also inhibit one’s range of contact. Of course this is
all compounded by society, which often places elders where they are rarely
seen or heard. The differences between chosen and imposed withdrawal in
the orbit of a nursing facility are clear. If loss of physical aptitude occurs, the
patient may naturally shift in attitude; a major improvement in physical
abilities could also reverse an imposed withdrawal. Transcendence in the
face of imposed withdrawal is perhaps less likely, though certainly not
impossible.
 In efforts to construct a socially effective sense of self in old age, we
are tested on our time identity. We look toward a good future moment in
order to escape the burden of the present. The normal societal model for old
age has been to encourage letting go, but not to seek a new life and role—a
new self. This promotion of false old age, or denial, stifles normal
development. What should normal psychic development from maturity to
death be? Is there seldom enough courage to confront aging selves without
delusion? Just to seem younger and look younger is playacting. The wisdom
of humility, which can be endless and strangely strong, is seldom encouraged.
Intent on perfection and measuring up to expectations, we shy away as
amateurs from “lovemaking” in creative activity and imagination.
In truth we are called to become more and more human; we must
discover the freedom to go beyond limits imposed on us by our world and
seek fulfillment. In the beginning we are what we are given. By midlife,
when we have finally learned to stand on our own two feet, we learn that to
complete our lives, we are called to give to others so that when we leave this
world, we can be what we have given. Death, from this perspective, can be
made our final gift. We believe it daily, but is it not possible, that by living
our lives, we create something fit to add to the store from which we came?
As Florida Maxwell has reminded us, our whole duty may be to clarify and
increase what we are, to make our consciousness a finer quality. The effort of
one’s entire life would be needed to return laden to our source.

All too often when gerontologists use the term “gerotranscendence,”

they do not specify as clearly as possible all that they might describe. They
do not take full account of those compensations that old age leaves behind.
Nor do they sufficiently explore new and positive spiritual gifts. Perhaps
they are just too young. I am still eager in my old age to activate words that
sound a bit ethereal in order to make them lively components of behavior.
With great satisfaction I have found that “transcendence” becomes very much
alive if it is activated into “transcendance,” which speaks to soul and body
and challenges it to rise above the dystonic, clinging aspects of our worldly
existence that burden and distract us from true growth and aspiration.
To reach for gerotranscendance is to rise above, exceed, outdo, go
beyond, independent of the universe and time. It involves surpassing all
human knowledge and experience. How, for heaven’s sake, is this to be
accomplished? I am persuaded that only by doing and making do we become.
Transcendence need not be limited solely to experiences of withdrawal. In
touching, we make contact with one another and with our planet.
Transcendance may be a regaining of lost skills, including play, activity, joy,
and song, and, above all, a major leap above and beyond the fear of death. It
provides an opening forward into the unknown with a trusting leap. Oddly
enough, this all demands of us an honest and steadfast humility.
These are wonderful words, words that wind us up into involvement.
Transcendance—that’s it, of course! And it moves. It’s one of the arts, it’s
alive, sings, and makes music, and I hug myself because of the truth it
whispers to my soul. No wonder writing has been so difficult.
Transcendance calls forth the languages of the arts; nothing else speaks so
deeply and meaningfully to our hearts and souls. The great dance of life can
transport us into all realms of making and doing with every item of body,
mind, and spirit involved. I am profoundly moved, for I am growing old and
feel shabby, and suddenly great riches present themselves and enlighten
every part of my body and reach out to beauty everywhere. Somewhere Keats
must be musing and smiling:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all

You know on earth, and all you need to know.

To grow old is a great privilege. It allows feedback on a long life that

can be relived in retrospect. With the years, retrospect becomes more
inclusive; scene and action become more real and present. Sometimes the
distant scenes and experiences are close to bewildering, and to relive them
in memory is almost overwhelming. With mind and heart set on retrospect, it
is natural in the ninth stage to find oneself on the upward course of a steep
hill. The path up this steep hill, to the vantage point where we can greet the
rising and setting sun, is narrow and littered with rocks and rubbish, but
every step rewards and draws us up higher. With every step too the view
stretches out its releasing display, and the sky and the clouds perform their
slow and gracious maneuvers.
But with all this fine talk you still may have your obligations to the body
that makes possible this climbing of the mountain, whatever its demands may
be. So the pack on your back must also be considered, and, before that, the
consistent care necessary to keep the body machinery functioning
appropriately in spite of the age and deterioration of the original model. I do
believe that in the ninth stage it is mandatory to lighten our load of
possessions, especially those that call for supervision and care. If you hope
to climb the mountain, whether or not meditation beckons you, travel must be
light and unburdened. A lifetime of training is required for success. It’s so
easy to blame the terrain, the light, the wind for failures and backsliding.
Moments of rest are mandatory, but there is no time for self-pity and
weakening of purpose. Light too is necessary, for the way and the days are all
too short. Song is joyous in the half-light. The dark offers release and dreams
of those near and dear and much beloved.
And so you set your course with your face to the rising sun, your eyes
alert for the slippery loose stones, your breath reluctant to maintain the pace.
You are forced to slow down and reconfirm your decision to proceed.
Always the syntonic and dystonic impulses, to proceed or to give in, wrestle
for control and the will to make good. You are challenged and tested. This
tension, when it is focused and controlled, is the very root of success. Every
step is a test of syntonic sovereignty and will power.
* L. Tornstam, “Gerotranscendence: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration,” in L. E. Thomas and
S. A. Eisenhandler, eds. Aging and the Religious Dimension (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Publishing Group, 1993).
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 Copyright

Copyright © 1997 by Joan M. Erikson. Copyright © 1982 by Rikan Enterprises Ltd.

First published as a Norton paperback 1998
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Erikson, Erik H. (Erik Homburger), 1902–1994

The life cycle completed : a review / Erik H. Erikson. —Extended
version / with new chapters by Joan M. Erikson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-393-03934-X
ISBN 978-0-393-34743-2 (e-book)
1. Developmental psychology. 2. Psychoanalysis. 3. Personality.
I. Erikson, Joan M. (Joan Mowat) II. Title.
BF713.E73 1997

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