For The Original Source Summary

For the Original Source Summary Reading, I chose to read A Life Cycle Completed by Erik Erikson. Erikson has been a pioneer for many decades on psychosocial development, which involves a series of stages individuals experience from infancy to adulthood to old age. This book provides additional context to the stages of life developed by Erikson. Within this book, he goes into greater detail about the identity crisis, the interdependence of history and life history, the life cycle, and the theory that maturity is not the end of psychological growth. Psychosexuality is used to describe the psychological and emotional aspects of sexuality. Within the reading, psychosexuality has been created to focus on the step by step growth of a fetus within

isolation as young adults begin to explore sexuality. Stagnation is also a stage that focuses on sexual frustrations as universal care is to improve the quality of the lives of all children through birth control. It is explained that young adults typically search for a sense of identity through intimacy, allowing commitment to show different sacrifices and compromises within the developmental stages of young adulthood. Within this reading, the last stage of psychosocial development, integrity vs despair, is described as “informed and detached concern with life itself in the face of death itself” (pg.61). This stage mainly focuses on wisdom as older adults have the most potential for wisdom as older adults have already learned and experienced life. This suggests that it takes a lifetime to truly know who you are, with the use of patience and skill throughout life. According to the reading, Erik Erikson made it a point to state that an individual life cycle cannot be adequately understood apart from social context. (pg.114). This suggests that individuals and society have to interrelate as the stages of development increase, but society does not know how to merge elders into the newer patterns of

My first reaction to this book was that it was detailed with information that I have been learning for years. The word “psychosocial” complements the theory of psychosexuality, suggesting that the defensive and adaptive functions of the ego play a major role within the life cycle of an individual. The major stages in psychosocial development became very interesting as I have never had the opportunity to go into greater detail about these different stages. Allow me to give my personal thoughts and reactions to each psychosocial developmental stage. Within the stages of Epigenesis and Pregnailty, I found Pregnailty to be very engaging as I had never heard anything like this before. This term refers to any stage in the psychosexual development in psychoanalytic theory occurring just before the genital stage. Within the textbook, it is said that children undergo three phases of sexual development. I found it interesting that we as students don’t often go into detail about these stages as I find them important. I believe that knowing these stages and the way they develop within children can help with the learning about their sexuality and knowing why these changes occur, especially within puberty. I ran across the play age, where preschool life shows an important process to which preschool children are able to cultivate their space with the use of toys and play dates with