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Erikson's Transitions Into Adolescence

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WHEN the child moves into adolescence (Stage Five—roughly the ages twelve to eighteen), he encounters, according to traditional psychoanalytic theory, a reawakening of the family-romance problem of
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Supplemental Teaching Handouts Module III - 12 - early childhood. His means of resolving the problem is to seek and find a romantic partner of his own generation. While Erikson does not deny this aspect of adolescence, he points out that there are other problems as well. The adolescent matures mentally as well as physiologically and, in addition to the new feelings, sensations and desires he experiences as a result of changes in his body, he develops a multitude of new ways of looking at and thinking about the world. Among other things, those in adolescence can now think about other people’s thinking and wonder about what other people think of them. They can also conceive of ideal families, religions and societies which they than compare with the imperfect families, religions and societies of their own experience. Finally, adolescents become capable of constructing theories and philosophies designed to bring all the varied and conflicting aspects of society into a working, harmonious and peaceful whole. The adolescent, in a word, is an …show more content…
That is to say, given the adolescent’s newfound integrative abilities, his task is to bring together all of the things he has learned about himself as a son, student, athlete, friend, Scout, newspaper boy and so on, and integrate these different images of himself into a whole that makes sense and that shows continuity with the past while preparing for the future. To the extent that the young person succeeds in this endeavor, he arrives at a sense of psychosocial identity, a sense of who he is, where he had been and where he is

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