Chapter 7 Erikson: Post-Freudian Theory 221Related Research
One of Erikson’s major contributions was to extend personality development into
adulthood. By expanding Freud’s notion of development all the way into old age,
Erikson challenged the idea that psychological development stops with childhood.
Erikson’s most influential legacy has been his theory of development and, in par-
ticular, the stages from adolescence into old age. He was one of the first theorists
to emphasize the critical period of adolescence and the conflicts revolving around
one’s search for an identity. Adolescents and young adults often ask: Who am I?
Where am I going? And what do I want to do with the rest of my life? How they
answer these questions plays an important role in what kinds of relationships they
develop, who they choose for a life-partner, and what career paths they follow.
Recall that Erikson argued that each stage of development emerges from and
is built upon a previous stage. So, for example, identity achievement in adolescence
involves having explored various elements of one’s self, both ideological (religion,
politics) and interpersonal (friendship, dating), and coming to what Erikson called
a commitment. Studies of Western cultures conclude that identity achievement is
the healthiest ego identity status, and that it ought to predict successful resolutions
of the next developmental tasks of intimacy and generativity. However, Erikson
(1959) also argued that, despite this step-wise quality of personality unfolding, all
developmental tasks are present in some way at every stage of life, even if they
vary in how pressing they are at different points. Thus, for teens involved in solid-
ifying their identity, concerns about intimacy, and even generativity, are meaningful
and present. Scholars have thus studied “later” psychosocial crises in earlier stages
of life as a way of seeing how successful resolution of developmental tasks can be
fostered at younger ages (Lawford, Pratt, Hunsberger, & Pancer, 2005).
In contrast to most other psychodynamic theorists, Erikson stimulated quite
a bit of empirical research, much of it on adolescence, young adulthood, and adult-
hood. Here we discuss recent research on development in adolescence and early
and middle adulthood, specifically the tasks of identity and intimacy.
Ego Identity Status in Adolescents Across Cultures
Erikson himself was what we might call today a cross-cultural psychologist, study-
ing people from several cultures, but he employed qualitative and case study meth-
odologies. Until recently little in the way of empirical investigation has been
conducted to test his personality development theory across cultures. In 2011,
Holger Busch and Jan Hofer sought to be among the first to do so.
Their study was an effort to test whether adolescents develop ego identity in
the same way across two very dissimilar cultures: the European nation of Germany
and the African nation of Cameroon. Participants in Busch and Hofer’s study were
15- to 18-year-old German and Cameroonian Nso teens. The Nso live in the high-
land grassfields in the northwest of the country, and so German teens were also
selected from the northwestern region of Germany for comparison. Adolescence
differs in both countries in some respects (e.g., Cameroonian parents emphasize
obedience to elders more strongly than do German parents, Cameroonian families
tend to be larger than German families, and so children in Cameroon have greater