Erik Erikson

Wilber's View

Erikson gets credit for a genuine disciplinary shift — psychoanalysis, in Wilber's account, was reductionistic in the specific sense of treating adult problems as always traceable back to early-childhood fixation, and Erikson's "psychosocial stages" undermined that by insisting later life stages (adolescence, adulthood, old age) bring their own genuinely new tasks and crises, not just replays of infantile conflict.

A detail worth knowing if you've read Wilber elsewhere: his own term centaur — which shows up throughout his work for the mature, integrated mind-body self at the top of the personal (pre-transpersonal) range — is borrowed directly from Erikson, who used it for the same mind-body integration. It's a small provenance fact easy to miss since Wilber uses "centaur" as though it were his own coinage in most other contexts.

Wilber's one reservation: Erikson's later stages don't cleanly separate vertical development (genuinely higher structural stages) from horizontal "seasons of life" (age-appropriate concerns that don't represent a higher level of consciousness) — a conflation Wilber says he's simply accepted and placed on the charts at their approximate position, rather than resolved.

In Integral Psychology

Erikson, coming from within the psychoanalytic tradition, posed such a profoundly far-reaching extension of its concepts that it actually helped to undermine psychoanalytic reductionism. — Integral Psychology, ch. 4

His "psychosocial stages," ranging from birth through adolescence to old age, struck an immediately sympathetic chord not only with the public but with many other researchers—he was clearly on to something of importance. — Integral Psychology, ch. 4

In Erikson's scheme, quite reminiscent of the "seven ages of a person," there are seven or eight major ages (or stages) of a person's life…Echoing a truth that was already beginning to surface from Baldwin's and Piaget's studies (and which was explicit in the German Idealists' vision, which greatly influenced both Baldwin and Piaget), each stage of development sees a different world—with different needs, different tasks, different dilemmas, different problems and pathologies. — Integral Psychology, ch. 4

Erikson's highest stages were not quite transpersonal (they were often horizontal unfoldings of a personal sort). — Integral Psychology, ch. 4

…"Centaur" is a term used by Erikson to denote a mature mind-and-body integration, where "human mind" and "animal body" are harmoniously one. — Integral Psychology, ch. 4

See Also

• Chart 4: Self-Related Stages — Erikson correlated against five other self-development researchers on the fulcrum spine
• Robert Kegan / Clare Graves — the other self-development researchers on the same fulcrum table
• James Mark Baldwin — the earlier figure whose influence on the "each stage sees a different world" insight Wilber credits alongside Piaget