The life span perspective of development provides interesting information about the development of individuals throughout their lifetime, such as who different individuals are, how individuals developed into who they are, and who or what individuals will end up becoming. The psychoanalytic perspective of psychology offers a deeper look into life span development and helps explain the stages of development that people go through in their life.
The life span perspective of development also provides significant facts in regard to how the effects of heredity, and the environment may come together in order to produce individual differences in life span development. To study human development the life span perspective is essential because it does not just take into account the development that occurs in childhood or adulthood but every phases of life. The life span perspective is a view of human development and has many different contexts, can be applied to various cultures, incorporates other disciplines, and is present throughout an entire lifespan.
Because development is multicontextual, it addresses issues such as constraints in the economy, patterns within a family, and historical conditions that affect our lives on a daily basis. As stated before, development can be applied to various cultures and therefore several cultures affect the development of individuals depending on where you were born, where you live, heritage, etc. In addition, development involves multiple disciplines.
This means that psychology and other disciplines, such as biology, neuroscience, education, economics, anthropology, sociology, religion, history, genetics, and medicine provide insight into human development throughout an individual’s life. Lastly, development is can take many different directions. Development being able to take different paths means that change occurs in every aspect of life and in every direction—not just taking one pathway or making a straight line. Development also possesses flexible qualities.
What this statement means is that any individual can carry certain traits, which may be altered at any time during life. Change that occurs in our life throughout the various stages of development is ongoing but does not happen easily in most cases. The intention of the life span perspective is to understand the development that occurs throughout an individual’s lifespan and the nature of development and change throughout that individual’s lifespan. Every individual has unconscious needs, inner drives and deep motives.
These aspects of an individual’s life are rooted in childhood are the main ideals behind the psychoanalytic theory. Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and German-born American developmental theorist Erik Erikson developed theories of life span development to explain the occurrence of development through an individual’s life span, and both believed that development occurs in stages The psychosexual theory was developed by Sigmund Freud and focused on the sexual drives of humans.
Freud believed that development occurred in stages and that the first six years of development occurs in three stages. These stages are characterized by sexual interest and pleasure centered on a specific part of the body. The oral stage occurs from birth to one year of age and focus areas are the mouth, tongue, lips, and gums. The anal stage occurs between the ages of one and three and the particular part of the body of focus is the anus. The phallic stage occurs between the ages of three and six and the particular part of the body of focus is the penis.
During the phallic stage, genital stimulation is how the individual will gain pleasure. Latency occurs after the phallic stage. After latency the genital stage occurs at puberty and lasts throughout adulthood. Freud believed that earlier stages influenced adult habits and personalities, therefore new stages would occur in adult years. The psychosocial theory developed by Erik Erikson describes eight developmental stages and in every stage, a certain challenge or developmental crisis occurs.
In Erikson’s theory, there are two opposites that occur within every stage or crisis in an individual’s life. The interaction between the social environment and the individual is beneficial to resolving all of the possible crisis’ one can encounter. For each stage, Erikson named two polarities and identified a wide range of outcomes between these opposites. The developmental st developmental stage of Erikson’s psychosocial theory concentrates on an person’s social needs.
The eight stages are trust vs. mistrust, autonomy vs. hame and doubt, initiative vs. guilt, industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. role confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. stagnation, and integrity vs. despair. These eight stages differ from Freud’s psychosexual theory stages because they do not emphasize sexual urges. The emphasis of psychosocial theory is placed on every individual’s relationships to culture and family. Heredity and the environment, also known as nature and nurture, both have an influence over the development of individuals.
Whether nature or nurture has more of an influence over individual development is debatable and has been a common argument in the field of psychology for a long time. Nature refers to inherited traits and genes given to us at birth which we have no control over, and nurture refers to family, friends or society. The exchange between nature and nurture is dynamic and complex and both nature and nurture cause dynamic and continuous influence on development. The relationship between nature and nurture cannot be explained definitively and it is hard to determine which one influences human development more.
The life span perspective provides significant information in relation to how and why individuals develop, who individuals will develop into, and why they become what they become. Psychoanalytic theories, such as Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual theory and Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theory provide insight into life span development and the information given by these theories is necessary to learn and understand. Heredity and the environment both have an effect on development but to what extent each more so influences development is still unable to be said with concrete certainty.
