The Life Cycle Completed

Picked up this short book from a Little Free Library in my neighborhood.  As I am now entering old age, it made some sense.

The Life Cycle Completed by Erik H Erikson

NY:  WW Norton, 1982

ISBN 0-393-30229-6

(9)  Thus, a look back on this century’s last few decades makes it clear that old age was “discovered” only in recent years - and this both for theoretical and historical reasons - for it certainly demanded some redefinition when an ever-increasing number of old people were found (and found themselves) to represent a mass of elderlies rather than an elite of elders.  Before that, however, we had come at last to acknowledge adulthood as a developmental and conflictual phase in its own right, rather than merely the mature end of all development (ie, Benedek 1959).

(25-26)  There is, in whatever order, the biological process of the hierarchic organization of organ systems constituting a body (soma);  there is the psychic process organizing individual experience by ego synthesis (psyche);  and there is the communal process of the cultural organization of the interdependence of persons (ethos).

(29)  In childhood, sexual development undergoes three phases, each of  which marks the strong libidinization of a vital zone of the organism.  Therefore,  they are usually referred to as the “oral,” the “anal,” and the “phallic” phases.  The far-reaching consequences of their strong libidinal endowment for the vicissitudes of human sexuality have been abundantly demonstrated - that is, the playful variety of pregenital pleasures (if, indeed, they remain “forepleasures”), the ensuing perversions, if one of the other remains demanding enough to upset the genital primacy;  and, above all, the neurotic consequences for the undue repression of strong pregenital needs.  Obviously, these three stages, too, are linked epigenetically, for anality (2i) exists during the oral stage (1) and must take its place in the “phallic” stage (III), after its normative crisis in the anal stage (2ii).

(34)  The mouth primarily incorporates, even as it can also eject content or close itself up to incoming matter.  The anus and the urethra retain and eliminate, while the phallus is destined to intrude, and the vagina include.  

(44)  and here, while we are always inclined to pair an infant with its mother, we must of course allow for other maternal persons and, indeed, for fathers, who help to evoke and to strengthen in the infant the sense of a primal Other - the I’s counterpart.

(48)  The epigenetic chart, however, will insist that the dramatic does not replace but rather joins the numinous, and the judicial elements, even as it anticipates the elements as yet to be ontogenetically;  namely the formal and the ideological.

NB:  Epigenetics -  literally means "above" or "on top of" genetics. It refers to external modifications to DNA that turn genes "on" or "off." These modifications do not change the DNA sequence, but instead, they affect how cells "read" genes.

Source:  https://www.livescience.com/37703-epigenetics.html

syntonic - of a person) responsive to and in harmony with their environment so that affect is appropriate to the given situation. "culturally syntonic" of a psychiatric condition or psychological process) consistent with other aspects of an individual's personality and belief system. 

suffix: -syntonic "this phobia was ego-syntonic" relating to or denoting the lively and responsive type of temperament that was considered liable to bipolar disorder.

(55)  To restate the sequence of psychosocial stages throughout life means to take responsibility for the terms Joan Erikson and I have originally attached to them - terms that include such suspect words as hope, fidelity, and care. These [hope, fidelity, and care], we say, are among the psychosocial strengths that emerge from the struggles of syntonic and dystonic tendencies at three crucial stages of life:  hope from the antithesis of basic trust vs basic mistrust in infancy;  fidelity from that of identity vs identity confusion in adolescence;  and care from generativity vs self absorption in adulthood.  (The vs stands for “versus,” and yet also, in the light of their complementarity, for something like “vice versa.”)  Most of these terms seem not foreign to the claim that, in fact, “qualify’ a young person to enter the generational cycle - and an adult to conclude it.

NB:  generativity - a concern for people besides self and family that usually develops during middle age especially : a need to nurture and guide younger people and contribute to the next generation —used in the psychology of Erik Erikson

(59)  Hope is “expectant desire,” a phrase well in accordance with a vague instinctual drivenness undergoing experiences that awaken some firm expectations.

(62)  No doubt, the role of old age needs to be reobserved, rethought.  To this we can here try to contribute only by rviewing our scheme.  So back to the chart:  What is the place of old age in the length and width of it?  Located as it is chronologically in the upper right corner, its last dystonic item, we said, is despair;  and as we take a quick glance at the lower left left corner we remember that down there the first syntonic element is hope.  In Spanish, at least, this bridges esperanza and desesperanza.  And indeed, in whatever language, hope connotes the most basic quality of “I”-ness, without which life could not begin or meaningfully end.  And as we ascend to the empty square in the uppper left corner, we realize that up there we need a word for the last possible form of hope as matured along the whole first ascending vertical:  for this, certainly, the word faith suggests itself.

(65-66)  For individual life is the coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history;  and all human integrity stands or falls with the one style of integrity of which one partakes.

(78)  … some anal-muscular self-will

NB:  the relation between anus and muscles

(87)  “As may be said of our life, it is not worth much, but it is all we have…”

The Child’s Conception of Geometry by Jean Piaget, Inhelder Bärbel, and Alina Szeminska