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Erikson's and Fromm's Developmental Theories
Psychology of Personality · Chapter 7: Psychodynamic Theories and Their Key FiguresSection 7.4 · lesson 45 of 83video coming soon
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In this lesson
Development across a whole life, and the burden of being free.
- Explain Erikson's psychosocial stages and their crises
- Explain Fromm on primary ties, individuation and freedom
- Describe Fromm's character orientations and social character
- Critically assess this chapter's theories and key figures
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Everything said in the video, section by section (2,089 words). Read along, or search it.
Psychodynamic Theories and Their Key Figures
Erikson and Fromm
Freud's scheme reaches its last stage at puberty, and adds nothing after it. Adult personality, on that account, is treated as essentially settled in childhood. Erik Erikson extended development across the whole of a life, in eight stages. Erich Fromm extended it in a different direction. Outward, into society and history. This section explains Erikson's stages, and the strength each crisis leaves behind. It explains Fromm on primary ties, on individuation, and on the burden of freedom. Then his character orientations, and the idea he called social character. And because this closes the chapter, it assesses the whole tradition, and its key figures. That last job matters. It is the outcome the chapter has been building toward.
Revisiting Erikson
What a Stage Is Actually Made Of
This is the closing section of the chapter, so it carries two jobs at once. It finishes the developmental account with Erikson and Fromm, and then judges the tradition as a whole. Erikson is not new to you. Section three point four set him beside Freud, and section three point five walked the eight stages. So we start one level down, with what a stage is actually made of. Erikson called the sequence epigenetic. The stages unfold in a set order, each becoming urgent at its own moment. At the centre of each one sits a crisis, and that word is not doing what it sounds like. A crisis is a turning point, not a catastrophe. A period of heightened potential, in both directions at once. Each crisis is a tension between two poles. Trust and mistrust, for instance. And here is the part students get wrong. The task is not to eliminate the negative pole. Some mistrust is useful. What you want is a workable balance, tilted toward the positive side, depositing what Erikson called a basic strength. And no stage is ever finally closed. Later crises reopen earlier ones, so a failure is a setback rather than a sentence. One last contrast. Freud's sequence closes at puberty, and although the genital stage runs on, no new crisis arrives after it. Erikson's runs from birth to death, driven by social demand rather than by a bodily zone.
The Mechanism
The Shape of Every Stage
So every one of the eight stages has the same shape. Age brings a new social demand. School, say, or a partner, or the question of what you will leave behind. That demand opens a crisis, with two poles pulling against each other. The person reaches some resolution, ideally a balance tilted toward the positive pole. And that resolution deposits a basic strength. Hope, or will, or care, depending on the stage. Which is then carried forward into everything that follows. And reopened, whenever a later stage puts pressure on it. Hold that shape in mind. The next slide is this diagram, run eight times.
All Eight
The Whole Sequence, With Ages Attached
Here are all eight in one place. You met them in section three point five, so treat this as recall. What is new is the age column. The boundaries are approximate, and you still need them. Exam questions hand you a person and an age, and ask which crisis they are in. Infancy, the first year. Trust against mistrust, and the strength is hope. Early childhood, roughly one to three. Autonomy against shame and doubt, yielding will. The play age, three to six. Initiative against guilt, yielding purpose. School age, six to twelve. Industry against inferiority, yielding competence. Adolescence brings identity against role confusion, yielding fidelity. Young adulthood brings intimacy against isolation, yielding love. Adulthood, roughly forty to sixty-five. Generativity against stagnation, yielding care. Then old age, integrity against despair, yielding wisdom. Those period names are close to Erikson's own. Other books say toddler, preschool, midlife and late adulthood, for the same eight stages. One warning. Generativity is the term students misread most often. It means investing in what will outlast you. The next generation. Work. Ideas. People whose ending you will not see. Its opposite is not failure but self absorption. You can be extremely successful and stagnant at the same time.
Identity
The Idea That Escaped the Clinic
One of these stages escaped psychology altogether, and you already use its vocabulary. Erikson coined the term identity crisis, and he described adolescence as a psychosocial moratorium. A licensed pause, in which a society lets a young person try roles on before committing. That is a generous idea, and the generosity is easy to miss. Not knowing who you are becomes developmental work, rather than a delay, or a failure of nerve. There is a nice detail here. Erikson chose his own surname when he became an American citizen. The man who gave us the identity crisis quite literally named himself. You have already seen where the idea went next. In section five point three, James Marcia turned it into four identity statuses, by crossing exploration against commitment. One footnote worth carrying. Joan Erikson, his collaborator and wife, later added a ninth stage. It covers very old age, when failing bodies and narrowing worlds put every earlier strength under strain again.
Fromm
Freedom Arrives With a Bill
Now to Erich Fromm, who lived from nineteen hundred to nineteen eighty. He left Germany in the nineteen thirties, and he wrote with one question in front of him. Why do people hand their freedom to a dictator? That question produced Escape from Freedom, published in nineteen forty-one. His answer begins with a distinction that is easy to state and hard to forget. There is freedom from, and there is freedom to. Freedom from is the severing of old bonds. Tradition, place, an inherited role. Freedom to is the capacity to live productively once those bonds are gone. And here is the problem. The first arrives long before the second. In that gap a person is genuinely free, and also isolated, small, and unprotected. Fromm's claim is that the combination is unbearable. Unbearable enough that people will pay a great deal to end it.
Ontogeny
Freedom Grows the Same Way a Child Does
That story is usually told about history. Europe leaving the medieval world behind. But Fromm tells the same story about a single person, and most summaries drop this half. It is the half that makes him a developmental theorist, rather than only a social critic. Every infant begins inside what Fromm called primary ties. Bonds to the mother, to the family, to a given place in a given world. They supply security and belonging, and they cost separateness. There is not yet an individual there to be separate. Growing up severs those ties one at a time. Fromm calls that process individuation. The self that emerges is stronger and more capable, and in exactly the same motion, more alone. Strength and aloneness arrive together. That is the whole of Fromm's developmental claim. Which opens the same fork the history opened. Either the new strength is spent productively, in love and in work. Or the aloneness becomes intolerable, and the person goes looking for something to submit to. So what happened to Europe across centuries happens to every person in a childhood. That parallel is why Fromm reads authoritarianism as a developmental failure, and not only a political event.
Escape Routes
Three Ways to Give Freedom Back
Fromm described three ways of giving freedom back. The first is authoritarianism. You fuse with a power outside yourself, so that you no longer stand alone. That can mean submitting to it. It can also mean dominating others. Fromm's point is that those two look opposite and serve the same need. The second is destructiveness. If the world threatens you, one solution is to remove the world. He read much destructiveness as unlived life, turned outward. The third is automaton conformity, and it is the one aimed at ordinary life. You become exactly what is expected of you. The self is surrendered so completely that the loss is never noticed. That is the sharpest claim in the book. Conformity is not the safe alternative to the other two escapes. It is a third escape. Quieter, far more common, and effective precisely because it feels like nothing is happening.
Character
Where a Person Gets Their Bearings
Fromm's developmental account continues in Man for Himself, published in nineteen forty-seven. There he described character orientations. Settled ways of relating to the world, which persist across situations. The receptive orientation holds that the good comes from outside, and the task is to be given it. The exploitative orientation agrees it comes from outside, but takes it. The hoarding orientation locates security in keeping. The marketing orientation has aged most sharply. Here the self is a commodity, worth whatever it currently sells for. Against those four he set the productive orientation, which is his picture of health. Loving, reasoning and working out of one's own powers, rather than by borrowing them. Then comes the step that makes him a social theorist. He called it social character. A society moulds people to want to do what it needs them to do. And he names the route by which that happens. The family is the psychological agent of society. Parents raise a child to the pattern their culture requires, so a social demand arrives as a personal character. In The Sane Society, published in nineteen fifty-five, he pushed that further. A whole society can be sick. And its members will experience that sickness as normality.
What Holds
What This Chapter's Theories Earned
This closes the chapter, so step back across all four sections, not just this one. The outcome asks you to assess psychodynamic theories, and their key figures. Take the strengths first. One move runs through the whole chapter. The causes of personality kept moving outward, from drive to ego, to relationship, and finally to society and history. Freud's structural model, in section seven point one, supplied a working vocabulary for conflict. Ambivalence, defence and self deception could finally be named. Nothing else at the time could name them. Section seven point two read the symptom as a solution rather than a fault. And it ranked defences by what they cost in contact with reality, which clinicians still find usable. Horney, in section seven point three, moved the origin of neurosis into culture and relationships. That correction outlasted the evidence which produced it. It is now simply how the work is done. Erikson made adulthood and old age developmental territory, rather than the leftovers after childhood. And identity, generativity and Marcia's statuses are now measured with ordinary research methods. Fromm and Erikson also left a positive standard of health, not merely the absence of symptoms. Erikson is among the most testable theories in this whole tradition. Faint praise inside psychoanalysis, real praise outside it.
What Does Not
Where the Ground Is Soft
Now the other half, and it has to be said just as plainly. Start with the principle underneath everything. Psychic determinism, from section seven point one. If every mental act carries meaning, an interpretation is always available for any behaviour. That makes the framework powerful, and it makes very little count against it. The defence hierarchy in section seven point two is a clinical ranking, not a measured one. It is genuinely useful to work with. No independent measurement validates the ordering. Klein's infant inner world, in section seven point three, is the least establishable claim in the chapter. The evidence must run entirely through adult interpretation. The infant cannot give an account. Erikson's universality is contested. A fixed sequence risks generalising one century's Western middle class life course into human nature. And the stages describe what happens, without saying what makes a resolution succeed. Fromm's central terms are rarely operationalised. The orientations are diagnosed, not measured. A sick society also presupposes a standard of health, and that standard has to be argued for. One named disagreement worth carrying. Carol Gilligan, in In a Different Voice, published in nineteen eighty-two, challenged the ordering. She argued that identity before intimacy describes men's development better than women's, who work the two out together.
Consolidate
How to Leave This Chapter
So leave the chapter holding four sections and one direction of travel. Freud's drives, then the ego that manages them, then the relationships that form it, then the society that shapes it. Erikson gives you eight stages, each a crisis between two poles. Each resolution deposits a basic strength, and none of them is ever finally closed. Fromm gives you individuation, where strength and aloneness arrive in the same motion. And three escapes when the aloneness wins. Authoritarianism, destructiveness, and automaton conformity. For the assessment, notice that one feature does the work twice. The reach of this tradition is its strength. Interpretation as its method is its limit. It produced the richest vocabulary anyone has for conflict, development and self deception. And it reached almost all of that by interpretation, rather than by measurement. The next chapter answers directly, by studying only what can be seen from outside.
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