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Of the many contributions that Erikson has made, I want to focus on two in this paper. One is his reminder and elaboration of the idea that the society — not just the family, but the society — in which one grows up influences the very shape and structure of one's ego and one's identity and the second is his extension of developmental stages to cover the entire life cycle.
In discussing his central concept of ego identity, Erikson 1959, 1963) reminds us again and again that identity is not merely an individual phenomenon, but is rooted in society. For example, he writes that ego identity is both “a subjective experience, and as a dynamic fact, a group psychological phenomenon” (1959, p. 22). He also writes that ego identity is partly dependent on “the process by which a society (often through subsocieties) identifies the young individual …” (1959, p. 122).
Most contemporary psychoanalytic theories (as well as psychoanalytic treatment) tend to ignore the role of culture in development and personality functioning.1 Instead they tend to universalize patterns that are derived from experience with a limited and selected population — generally, middle class Western whites — and that are rooted in a particular historical context. Furthermore, in subtle ways, these theories often function prescriptively as well as descriptively. For example, Kirshner (1990) has suggested that certain psychoanalytic theories, in which, autonomy is viewed as a sort of developmental end point, are, in part, prescriptions for the direction in which a particular society in a particular historical era needs its members to develop. Thus, psychoanalytic theories, along with other theories of human behavior, both reflect and influence social values.
Erikson's work can serve as an important foundation for the