Chapter 8 - Stages of Personality Development

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the idea of personality stages and types. The structure of personality is based on the idea of personality stages and types. The idea that there are types of people and stages in the development of personality is as old as recorded history, and older than any attempts at measurement. In relation to personality, stage theories of moral judgment are well known for recent years. The distinctive feature of this theory is that knowledge of the highest or end state is used to define previous states. Further, ego-development and its stages are discussed. Major instrument of the study ego development has been the Sentence Completion Test (SCT). The SCT has proven to be well adapted to the task of refining the definition of the stages in accordance with data from thousands of cases. The theory of ego development has been criticized, because it does not present each stage as a logically coherent whole. It does not prescribe higher stages as better, and it “confuses” structure with content. The stages of moral development and the stages of ego development are very similar at the lower stages, but at the higher stages it is harder to draw exact parallels. The same comments hold for many other developmental stage theories propounded in recent years.