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In considering some of the major human developmental tasks, it became clear to me that we had to rethink the issues in the context of an era of a dizzying rate of change in society and on our planet as a whole. However fond some of us have become of certain schemata—for example, of Erikson's illuminating “eight stages of man” (1950)—one task for the psychoanalyst and social scientist is to periodically reevaluate concepts which have become assimilated and taken for granted. Today's children and adults face the possibility of the extinction of our species as a result of thermonuclear war, ecologic disaster, or widespread hunger and violence. Lifton (1971) in his conception of Protean Man tries to make a case for the eradication of the concept of “self” in favor of a concept of “self-process” which is continually changing and adapting to the rapid shifts in environmental and historic forces.
We must, however, be very careful of constructing compliantly adaptive concepts lest we help make them self-fulfilling prophesies. For the present we are alive, human, and many of us are still possessed of a relatively healthy, stable sense of selfhood. As students of human development we have had the apparently double function of 1) conceptualizing our observations “neutrally,” as if there were no values implicit in our very methods of observation, and 2) creating concepts whose values we are more or less aware of, values that have to do with a respect for both “the maturational process and the facilitating environment.” .