Age psychology studies the process of development of mental functions and personality throughout a person’s life. The main difference between the direction of age psychology from another direction is that it focuses on the dynamics of age change. Each period of growing up is determined by the level of social development and opens up a new space of social growing up, realized in a new relationship “teenager-society” and a new social, pedagogical situation. Therefore, when studying growing up, attention is focused on the search for opportunities to build a system of externally specified activities that provides a fundamental restructuring of the inner movement of a teenager. Studying age psychology, many psychologists have put forward their opinions and theories.
This man was born on June 15, 1902, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His mother never introduced him to his biological father, and he was adopted by his stepfather. The birth story of the future psychologist likely is what made him feel the need to explore the concept of identity. This was an essential step in the world of psychology and psychoanalysis. The man’s interest in psychology did not wake up immediately. After graduating from high school, he traveled around Europe, then entered an art school contrary to the instructions of his stepfather, a pediatrician, to take up medicine.
In Vienna, he got a job as a painting teacher at an experimental school founded by Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna. Children whose parents took a course in psychoanalysis attended this school. It is not surprising that he soon met Freud himself, and became interested in psychoanalysis. The Nazi invasion of Germany forced him to emigrate to America. In Boston, he found a wide range of practice in the application of psychoanalysis for children. Moreover, he worked at various medical institutes, including Harvard University and the University of California. This person studied the psychology of children from different social structures, and environments, considered emotional and psychological problems, and recorded observations in his most famous work “Childhood and Society.”
In his opinion, the development of children and youth depends very much on the social environment. His position was that development is evident throughout human life, during biological growth, stabilization, and decay (Gilleard, 2020). During the period of growing up, a person naturally has identity crises because he faces many tasks, such as physical maturation, mastering the role of an adult, and choosing a profession, which makes it extremely difficult to identify himself. The central theme of individual development and existence is the constant striving for one’s own identity and its preservation. The psychologist attached great importance to roles and role behavior, which connects his approach with sociological theories of growing up.
Later, he married a Canadian woman, and they had four children. He becomes a teacher at Harvard, and later, he and his family move to California, where he begins teaching at the University of California. After a while, he and his family move to San Francisco. His last works and research, which continued until he died in 1994, are mainly devoted to old age and the previous stage of the life cycle.
This scientist-psychologist is Erik Erikson, whose ideas, the central ones of which are the concept of identity and the theory of personality development and the life cycle, have had a significant impact on the development of psychology. Erikson’s most important contribution was the model of personality development, which covers the entire period of human life. Erik Erikson died on May 12, 1994, in Harwich, Massachusetts, USA.
Reference
Gilleard, C. (2020). The final stage of human development? Erikson’s view of integrity and old age. International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 14(2), 139–162. doi: 10.3384/ijal.1652- 8670.1471