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Erikson 's Psychosocial Theory Of Development Essay

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In this Individual Theory Paper, I decided to write about Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory of Development. Erik Erikson is greatly influenced by Freud but instead of concentrating on psychosexual stages, Erikson choose to focus more on the individual’s psychosocial stages as well as their personality development. Psychosocial theory can be defined as a study about human development as an outcome of the interaction in which involves the psychological or the needs of an individual, and the expectations from their society (Merriam-Webster, 2016). Freud’s stage theory was too specifically focused on an individual’s body zones, and he also vaguely discussed about the interaction between children and their significant others wherein Erikson was trying to elaborate by introducing some comprehensible concepts stage by stage in his theory (Crain, 2011). In Erikson’s theory, he tend to highlight the role of society as well as the conflict that can occur, and this made Erikson an ‘ego’ psychologist. An assumption was made that every stage is faced with different conflicts and if the individual fail to resolve it at that time, it will be dragged into their next stages of life. Thus, Erikson suggested a lifespan model of development for his theory that is set well in eight stages. The first stage is the most important development stage and it looks into the individual’s basic trust versus mistrust. This happens during an individual’s infancy period whereby the infant is still uncertain of

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