Identity: Youth and Crisis

According to Erikson, how can the powers of a dominant culture stunt personality development in marginalized youth, and what psychological forces can reverse the process?

How does the School Age (Stage 4 in Erikson’s life cycles) serve as both the culmination of the earlier childhood stages and a necessary precursor to the Adolescent stage?

How is Erikson’s view of the role of prototypes in personality development like and unlike that of Carl Jung?

In reviewing Identity: Youth and Culture in the New York Times, sociologist Robert Nisbet described Erikson’s effort “to unite the essential perspective of individual psychology with those of anthropology and sociology.” Select passages from three different chapters in the text and show how Erikson touches on all those fields in them.

Read this article on Hitler Youth from the US Holocaust Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia and write an essay relating the movement to Erikson’s beliefs about totalitarianism and adolescents.

How might Martin Luther, as Erikson says in Chapter 1, demonstrate that the identity crisis in individual life and contemporary crises in historical development are inseparable?

Erikson first describes what he calls “pseudospecies” in Chapter 1. In Chapter 8 he says that technological sophistication escalates the problem but that a “new and shared technological universe” may help overcome prejudices. Do Erikson’s beliefs hold up with regard to modern technology? Support your ideas with examples from the text.

Freud’s psychosexual theory of gender development was based on case studies of his patients, while Erikson’s theorizing about women’s personality development, described in Chapter 7, was based on observations of children at play. What conclusions did each analyst reach? How might their research have contributed to those conclusions?