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Schools of thought[show] Psychology portal • v • t • e Erikson's stages of psychosocial development as articulated by Erik Erikson explain eight stages through which a healthily developing human should pass from infancy to late adulthood. In each stage the person confronts, and hopefully masters, new challenges. Each stage builds on the successful completion of earlier stages. The challenges of stages not successfully completed may be expected to reappear as problems in the future. However, mastery of a stage is not required to advance to the next stage. Erikson's stage theory characterizes an individual advancing through the eight life stages as a function of negotiating his or her biological forces and sociocultural forces. Each stage is characterized by a psycho social crisis of these two conflicting forces (as shown in the table below). If an individual does indeed successfully reconcile these forces (favoring the first mentioned attribute in the crisis), he or she emerges from the stage with the corresponding virtue. For example, if an infant enters into the toddler stage (autonomy vs. shame & doubt) with more trust than mistrust, he or she carries the virtue of hope into the remaining life stages.[1]

Development is a dynamic phenomenon and a result of genetic structure. Increasingly privatisation and changing time is a regular process. There is a balance in development. Studying development separately from the different stages is necessary because of practical reasons. Erikson distinguishes eight stages of human development and states that at each stage, the individual is a psychosocial task that must be accomplished. There are two possible consequences of fulfilling each psychosocial task: If the task is completed, a real qualification is added to the person and progress is made in the development. If the task is not completed successfully, the conflict is resolved in an unsatisfactory manner, and the personality is damaged by the negative qualities that are added. The task of the individual is that gain a positive identity as goes from one stage to the other. The concept of personality is physical, mental, emotional and social characteristics of the individual. Personality is all of the qualifications of characteristics that are consistently exhibited and acquired later that separates the individual from others, and it is a changing, evolving and growing phenomenon during the lifespan.

Human development encompasses complex interactions between biological, psychological, and social influences, as Engel proposed in 1977 (Wong et al., 2015). The purpose of this paper is to analyze Erik Erikson's Psychosocial Developmental theory and apply it to critical events that occurred throughout the author's life and correlate developmental stage milestones with notable issues. The author presents traumatic experiences of abuse that occurred from birth until adolescence and significant influences in her development during that time period until her current age of 48. Research has shown that intense trauma and adverse events can disrupt normal development (Nader, 2020). The paper attempts to take research on trauma, the traumatic events in the author's life, and incorporate a view of each stage of psychosocial development.