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Children are born, grow up in a specific environment, have children, age, and die. The person enters an environment which has its own qualities and organizes these qualities in specific ways at different phases of his history. Each individual, although different, has similarities with others. Dr. Lidz has attempted the difficult task of defining the human being in his life history. He assembles an enormous range of data and delineates with great skill the knowledge of the basic givens now available about certain aspects of this history.
The epigenetic principle which originated with Freud and was extended by Erikson dominates the story. It states that developmental progress occurs only with the confronting and working through of the specific task of each phase in progressive sequence. Each period of the person's life is an event in that it presents very definite tasks for intrapsychic and interpersonal development.
This process of task accomplishment continues throughout the history of the person. Obviously an individual does not find trust and autonomy in the time set by the theory. The foundations are laid in that period and from there increments of growth in other areas can occur. For instance, autonomy nuclei can develop in the second stage of life only after the foundations of trust in self and others have been securely set in the first.
The act of accomplishing these feats is performed by a person whose capacities are evolving. Lidz leans heavily on Piaget's concepts of cognitive organization and its development. At each point the person has certain possibilities of thinking available to him in his confrontation with reality. These limit and extend his ability to understand the world in which his operations arise. The cognitive capacity affects the paradigm the person has about the world and determines the solutions which he can find. For instance, the seven- to eleven-year-old is still involved in concrete forms of thinking. He is unable to perform formal operat