Childhood and Society

Citation

Erikson, E. H. (1993). Childhood and Society (W. W. Norton & Company). (Original work published 1950; second edition 1963; this edition includes the 1985 "Afterthoughts".)

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Childhood and Society is a psychoanalyst's attempt to place the child's inner development in its social setting. Erikson combines clinical case histories with field accounts of two Native American peoples and with studies of national and political identity. His central claim is that the growth of the ego cannot be understood from drives alone: it is shaped at every stage by the expectations, rituals and anxieties of the surrounding society, and the individual and the community develop together. The book is a collection of studies arranged in four parts rather than a single linear argument, and its best-known chapter, "Eight Ages of Man", sets out the life-cycle scheme on which the rest can be read.

The edition on this page opens with three forewords: the 1985 "Afterthoughts", the foreword to the second edition and the foreword to the first.

Part One: Childhood and the Modalities of Social Life

Chapter 1, Relevance and Relativity in the Case History. The chapter uses case histories to argue that a symptom has to be read at three levels at once: the body, the ego and the social situation. It sets out Erikson's view of the case history as a record of a person in a particular historical moment, not just of an isolated mind.

Chapter 2, The Theory of Infantile Sexuality. Erikson reviews Freud's account of the bodily zones and re-reads each as a mode of relating to others, so that bodily stages are linked to social ones. The chapter prepares the move from psychosexual to psychosocial thinking.

Part Two: Childhood in Two American Indian Tribes

Part Two begins with a short introduction and then turns to field material.

Chapter 3, Hunters Across the Prairie. The chapter examines Sioux childhood in a culture of prairie hunters, including rituals such as the Sun Dance and the vision quest, and considers how child-rearing fits a people's way of life and the sense of identity that results.

Chapter 4, Fishermen Along a Salmon River. The Yurok chapter does the same for a fishing people, with attention to cleanliness, order and self-restraint in child-rearing. Set beside the Sioux chapter, it contrasts a culture of mobility and daring with one of control, and shows that societies meet the same developmental tasks in different ways.

Part Three: The Growth of the Ego

An introduction precedes three chapters.

Chapter 5, Early Ego Failure: Jean. A clinical case of a young girl with physical and developmental difficulties, used to show how early breakdowns of the ego appear.

Chapter 6, Toys and Reasons. The chapter takes play seriously as a way for children to master experience and prepare for social roles, and it is one of the book's most direct statements on play.

Chapter 7, Eight Ages of Man. The core of the book. Erikson sets out eight stages of the life cycle, each defined by a central conflict: basic trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, identity versus role confusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and integrity versus despair. The stages follow an epigenetic order, each emerging in sequence and depending on those before it, and each is tied to the social relations around the child that support or fail it.

Part Four: Youth and the Evolution of Identity

An introduction opens the part.

Chapter 8, Reflections on the American Identity. Erikson reads American culture, including images such as "Mom", for what it asks of young people and how it shapes the formation of identity.

Chapter 9, The Legend of Hitler's Childhood. A psychohistorical study of the legend of Hitler's childhood, relating the leader's early history, as told in the legend around him, to the needs of the nation that followed him.

Chapter 10, The Legend of Maxim Gorky's Youth. A contrasting study of Gorky's youth, in which hardship in Russian society is turned to creative ends rather than destructive ones.

Chapter 11, Conclusion: Beyond Anxiety. The closing chapter draws the clinical, anthropological and historical strands together around the problem of anxiety and the conditions that allow a person and a society to grow.

Key Concepts

Parts One and Two

• Psychosocial reading of a symptom: understanding disturbance through the interplay of body, ego and social situation.
• Modes and zones: Freud's bodily zones treated as patterns of relating to other people.
• Cultural patterning of childhood: the claim that child-rearing practices in a society fit its economy and values, illustrated by the Sioux and Yurok.

Parts Three and Four

• Eight ages and their crises: successive tasks of the life cycle, from basic trust to integrity.
• Epigenetic principle: each stage has its own time of ascendancy and builds on the previous ones.
• Ego identity: the sense of continuity of the self that adolescence puts under strain.
• Play: children's way of working over experience and rehearsing roles.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Breadth of material. Clinical cases, field accounts of the Sioux and Yurok, and studies of national and political figures give a reader several kinds of evidence for the same idea.
• A usable life-cycle frame. "Eight Ages of Man" is a single chapter and can be read apart from the rest, so it works both as the book's centre and as a stand-alone reading.
• Historical context. The book's three forewords let a reader see how Erikson revisited his own work in 1963 and 1985.

Limitations

• Not a textbook. The book is a set of studies and essays, not a systematic survey, so readers wanting a clear sequence of topics will find the chapters uneven in scope.
• Dated material. The case histories and field accounts rest on clinical work and fieldwork of the mid-twentieth century, and the terms and assumptions reflect psychoanalysis of that period.
• Stage theory is one part of the book. Only a single chapter lays out the eight stages, so students who read only that chapter miss the cultural and clinical argument the stages are meant to support.
• Studies of leaders rest on legend. The titles of Chapters 9 and 10 signal that they work with legendary accounts of childhood, which is a weaker basis than documented biography.

Where It Fits in the Course

In this course on developmental psychology, Childhood and Society is a primary source for the psychosocial tradition, not an overview. Textbooks such as Shaffer and Kipp's Developmental Psychology: Childhood and Adolescence, Siegler, Saffran and Gershoff's How Children Develop and OpenStax's Lifespan Development survey the field as a whole; reading Erikson alongside them shows the psychosocial tradition at first hand. Goswami's Child Psychology: A Very Short Introduction gives a quick modern orientation, and Piaget's The Origin of Intelligence in the Child is a primary source for a different line of thought, on cognitive development. Miller's Theories of Developmental Psychology is a useful guide for comparing Erikson's framework with others.

How to Use This Book

A first-time reader can start with the Part Three introduction and Chapter 7, then return to Part One for the case-history approach and Part Two for the evidence from the Sioux and Yurok. Part Four suits a reader interested in identity, history or politics, and the final chapter pulls the themes together. The forewords are worth reading after the main chapters, since they place the book in Erikson's later thinking.

A useful exercise is to make a table of the eight stages, listing for each the central conflict and the social relations Erikson ties to it, and then to find an example from the Sioux or Yurok chapters or the case histories. Compare the table with a textbook account of Erikson to see what the textbook leaves out. Background in Freud's theory of psychosexual development is helpful for Chapters 1 and 2 but not essential.