Life Span Development and Personality Paper
Jennifer M. Volkert
PSY/300 Psychology
June13, 2011
Pamela Parks

Life Span Development and Personality Paper
Gandhi use to say, “My life, my message”. This was his passion, his calling, what he knew he was meant to do and how he was meant to serve others. How does a person develop into who they become? Who and what influences impact a life so much that it shapes a persons’ entire life? Gandhi always said that God was the guiding force behind why he did what he did. He was a servant that made many mistakes and much of what he did and said was a work in progress and an experiment with life. He spent his life spreading the message that truth and freedom through non-violence was the way.
He grew up in an affluent home and was married at the age of thirteen. It seems that quite a lot of his influences that helped to shape him happened when he went to London to attend law school and become a Barrister. He promised his mother that he would observe the Hindu precepts of abstinence from meat, alcohol and promiscuity (Brown, J. M. (1989). While there he joined the Vegetarian Society, the Theosophical Society and read the Bhagavad Gita which is the Hindu scriptures. In 1893, he was hired by an Indian firm to work in South Africa, where he faced discriminations that would be the turning point in his life, shaping his role as an activist.
Gandhi was born to an affluent family but did not begin his journey until he was away from his family at school in London. Heredity played a role in who he was but it was the influences of the environment that made him the man he became. The adversity that he faced while in South Africa faced with never-ending discrimination created a fire in him and he knew morally it was the right thing to do.
His father died when he was young and other than being told what was expected of him, the nurturing came from his mother. He felt an obligation to follow her guidance because it was not only what he was supposed to do, but because she was his support system. Erickson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development which says that when and where people develop is crucial to the way they grow and change throughout their lives, even within a single culture (Elder, 1998). He says there is several stages to this model of development that play a pivotal role in who an individual becomes. But what happens if a person must develop intellectually and emotionally before they are ready? For example, Gandhi was married at the age of 13 during what Erickson’s describes as the identity versus identity confusion age. Rather than being allowed focus on and get a sense of who he was, he was thrust into a life where he was treated like a man in his thirties. Although he managed to handle his responsibilities as required, you get a sense, in reading his work, that his choices that he made later in life, were influenced by the fact that he had little to no say when he was a child. He fought for what he believed because like him, he wanted others to have a voice and not be forced by laws or rules to suffer injustice simply because they were written that way. To him, people of all walks of life had the right to live the way they chose.
In Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development he believed that children developed knowledge by inventing reality out of their own experiences (Brainerd, 1996). He viewed intelligence as an individual’s way of adapting to new information about the world (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). Part of what made Gandhi who he was, was the fact that when he did not understand something which motivated him to find out why or what the meaning was. When he was beaten off a train because he refused to move for a white European he felt the discrimination of all minorities and rather than assimilate into that kind of lifestyle, he rose up against it.
Gandhi’s theoretical approach is best described, in my opinion, by Kohlberg’s Theory. His moral belief system changed over the course of his early life based on changes in cognitive structure. Gandhi’s post-conventional morality is centered on his belief that life and truth by a non-violent means was and is the way that we all should live. He was an avid activist and believed cows to be sacred for one example. He believed they represented every sub-human and that we should hold them in the highest regard. His morality led him to fight figuratively on their behalf but he clearly states in one of his writings that he would never kill a human to save a cow but he would never save a cow to save a human, be it ever so precious. Life and freedom were the things that he felt was his duty and obligation to stand up for. His humility and all of the pain and suffering that he endured kept him ever focused. I think that we all find strength within ourselves regardless of how we are brought up. Nature has a lot to do with what we ultimately decide is our calling; nurture just helps us to get there. I believe that we all face challenges in our lives and depending on how socially developed we are will determine our human experience. I think that for most, they are happy with how they were raised and the things they were taught because they did not have to face any adversity. They live in their nice homes with their white picket fences and exist. They do not give the world anything special because they do not see the world as special. Those that have had to face adversity and fight to survive and lived in an insecure existence with doubt and fear and anger; those are the people who make a difference because they see things in a way that many cannot comprehend. Like Gandhi, they have seen the most evil of man and yet they still believe that life and freedom are worth fighting for.

Reference
Brown, J. M. (1989). Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Kowalski, R., & Westen, D. (2009). Psychology (5th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley