The Human Life Cycle: The Traditional Hindu View and the Psychology of Erik Erikson

Abstract

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN psychoanalysis, especially in its emphasis on ego strengths (Heinz Hartmann) or basic virtues (Erik Erikson), show a startling affinity to the Hindu asrama (stages of life) theory. Though the phases of human development, like infancy, adolescence, etc., have been studied both by academic psychology and by psychoanalysis, the study of the individual life cycle as a functional whole and as a link in the chain of has been comparatively rare. Erikson has been the first psychoanalyst to treat this approach systematically. Erikson sees human development not as a continuum, but as a series of predetermined steps or stages by which the individual seeks contact in an ever-widening radius with his society, which welcomes and regulates his unfolding. Each phase of this development has a turning point, a crisis, which poses the solution of a specific task-a solution which is prepared in the preceding stages and is worked out further in the succeeding ones. The relative solution of each crisis in turn is the source of a specific psycho-social strength which is both the individual's heritage from and contribution to the succession of generations and to society's institutions. Erikson thus speaks of eight stages of man.'