They understand development as, an age-related life-span process, in which all human beings will experience this. They believe that, the environment, social and our biological heredity, influences how we develop. As we go through these various stages of development, factors such as, the environment, culture, our heredity and social interactions …show more content…
Erikson, unlike Freud believes that a person’s development is determined by our social and our cultural interactions. In a nutshell, this means, that we go through these eight stages to find out who we are--an ‘identity crisis’ not necessarily a catastrophic crisis, but rather a type of crisis where we are placed in the predicament of trying to find our identity, place or purpose in this world, and figuring out whether the environment we have been placed in is a trustworthy one or not. Our bases are formed this from our social and cultural interactions. For example; as babies, we face the crisis of trust and mistrust. And in the later stages of Erikson’s psychosocial development, nearing the stage of young adulthood, we face an identity crisis. An individual, who can effectively navigate their lives around their social and cultural interactions, can then successfully identify who they are. But a less fortunate person will then be faced with the problem of not being able to connect their ‘culture’ and their social surroundings; the individual would then conclusively result in an identity crisis. A Stage confusion, where they have not found out who they are. With the thought of fixation in the back of our minds, being unable to figure out our identity is a petrifying thought. On the less depressing side, however, Erikson states (Papalia, D.E., 2012), since development is a continuous process we can develop and proceed to the next stages and we can at any point go back to the stages at which we had failed to