Reflection On Erikson's Stages Of Development

I feel that the high openness to experience behavior stems from various episodes throughout my childhood life and how I interpreted these situations. I tend to experiment and also am pretty open to try new things at least once in my life. I dislike routine as I feel it stumps creativity and generally keep an open mind to new ideas and also new concepts which are usually not explored. In addition, I also have a pretty vivid imagination which aids me when I’m writing in general. Through a selection of personality and human development theories, I will explore the different factors that contributed to the development of my openness. The first theory that can explain my behavior is through Alfred Adler’s Individual Theory of superiority.

In stage 3, the initiative vs guilt stage is the stage where children (3-5 years old) are said to be given the opportunity to explore their interpersonal skills through initiating activities and ask many questions as their thirst for knowledge grows. ("Erikson’s Stages of Development”) During this period, I would often play and think up role playing games (pretending to cook, playing doctor) and my parents would be rather supportive of me and would ask my brother to play with me. Also, I had a lot of questions about the way the world works and would often ask a lot of these questions to my parents. Despite not providing me with an answer sometimes, they however did commend me for actually broadening up my mind and urged me to look it up, reducing the feeling of guilt in me for bothering them. As a result of my parents acknowledging my passion to learn and me using my imagination, it contributed to me being an overall creative person with a vivid imagination. In stage 5, the identity vs role confusion stage, Erikson focuses on the questions that teenagers from 12 – 19 years would like to answer like Who am I?', 'What are my values?', and 'What is my identity?’.(Ramkumar). According to Erikson, This is the stage where a child has to learn the roles he will occupy as an adult and it is during this stage that an adolescent will re-examine his or her identity and try to find out exactly who he or she is. Failure to establish an identity leads to role confusion or an identity crisis. (McLeod 2003) As a result of an identity crisis, an adolescent would explore many interest and possibilities and generally would be accepting of new ideas. I feel this relates to my situation as I do not feel as if I have a solid identity and still have a lot of possibilities and endeavors to discover before committing myself to one single solid identity to identify with. This relates with James Marcia’s