The years of maturity are typified by the stage of Integrity of the Self versus Despair. This is the most illuminating stage of a person's life. If all the crises of earlier stages are resolved, looking back with satisfaction of a life well led is a healthy manifestation of self. Maintaining a sense of worth and personal integrity during the final years is natural. Those who could not resolve earlier crises will look upon the prospects of old age and death with a deep sense of dread and despair.Another primary concept to Erikson's system is ego identity development and the ego strengths that delineate each of the eight stages. His system stresses the ego's complete and stabilizing influences in a person's life history. He depicts the ego from a psychosocial viewpoint as the hub of individual identity. As the ego develops through life crises, it gains the capacity to master in increasingly sophisticated ways the puzzles posed by inner and outer reality. Erikson proposed that ego strength is achieved in a sequence of psychosexual stages. Beginning in infancy, the child's ego must first learn to trust itself and others to become autonomous and self-sufficient. With trust and autonomy come the virtues of hope and will, forms of ego strength that foster sufficient security for the child to risk the potential disappointment that hope entails, and sufficient independence of spirit for children to dare to initiate willingly their personal adaptation to their inescapable realities. Once these fundamental ego strengths are acquired, the child is able to acquire a sense of purpose, competence, fidelity, love, care and wisdom - the ego strengths associated with each stage.Erikson's theory embodies a well-balanced concern for nonmothetic or universal psychological "laws" with some traditional psychoanalytic concern for the uniqueness of the individual, especially in the areas of clinical application and psychohistory. So where does all this theoriz...
