Containing accounts of the author's field work among Sioux and Yurok Indians, and an examination of the American, German and Russian characters, this is an interpretation of human life on psychological lines. Using case histories as springboards for theoretical discussion of the formative years of childhood, Professor Erikson identifies human life as a delicate balance between bodily, mental and social influences. The main chapters are devoted to anxiety in young children, apathy in American Indians, confusion in veterans of war, and arrogance in young Nazis.

For decades Erik Erikson's concept of the stages of human development deeply influenced the field of contemporary psychology. Here, through the scholarship of his closest collaborator, Joan Erikson, is an expanded edition of his final work, covering the full span of the life cycle. What Erik Erikson fell short of covering during his life of remarkable achievements was a ninth stage, of very old age. As human longevity increases, that stage has become of increasing significance to many individuals concerned about the quality and nature of their daily lives while they age into their eighth and ninth decades of life. Now Joan Erikson, in her nineties, masterfully guides us through the specific challenges and pleasures of older age, extending Erik Erikson's vision of human development in its major phases. In her introductory remarks about the ninth stage, Joan Erikson writes of the particular challenges faced by elders whose years of autonomy over their bodies and life choices are affected by the inevitable wages of time. She outlines the critical role that hope and faith must play in the lives of eighty- and ninety-year-olds, and she perceptively revises the concept of wisdom.

"The problem of Ego Identity" is dealt with successively from the biographic and the developmental, the clinical and the social points of view. "Growth and Crises of the Healthy Personality" is an elaboration of the original attempt to go beyond childhood and adolescence and to spell out the critical stages of the whole life cycle.

Erikson's now-famous concept of the life cycle delineates eight stages of psychological development through which each of us progresses. The last stage, old age, challenges the individual to rework the past while remaining involved in the present. The authors begin this work with their theory of life's stages through old age. In Part two, they discuss their interviews with twenty-nine octogenarians, on whom life history data has been collected for over fifty years. Part three is a discussion of the life history of the protagonist in Ingmar Bergman's film Wild Strawberries. In Part four, "Old age in our society", the authors offer suggestions for "vital involvement." Erik H. Erikson is winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Essays in ego psychology, based on papers written from 1951 to 1967, by a neo-Freudian analyst and theorist.

Explores the place of adulthood & old age in the human life cycle as well as the crises brought on by physical aging.