There are plenty of situations where one aspect of one’s identity appears at the expense of others—and the roles for both are not necessarily confused. Adolescents at home are not the same as adolescents at play with their mates and neither are older people. If we can define two domains as for example, family and career then the important question for adolescents would be how do I see myself as a mother/father and would that compromise my career with its status and financial returns? Although often this issue is deferred until later in one’s 20s in young adulthood it can be resolved by a career being firmly planned and pursued either with a forceful parent 10 foreclosing on the discussion or by the man/woman identifying—that’s me as an ‘artist / rock musician / celebrity’ with new family roles based on marriage or partner relationship assigned to moratorium or diffused status. How these mixed identities play out in different cultural settings would provide a nuanced and fascinating portrait of identities at that time of life.
The resolution of identity and role confusion according to Erikson is what he calls ‘fidelity ’. This implies integrity of the self as you are faithful to your beliefs, principles and relationships. It suggests that you have also attained a cognitive achievement in that you are capable of standing outside yourself, mentally and be able look at yourself and question your behaviour to and with other people in an objective, detached way. Consequently the psychosocial pitch of Erikson’s contribution to our understanding of development across the lifespan needs to be complemented by an approach that deals with different levels of thinking and cognition. Certainly the idea that your goals and your conduct constitute an ethical, principled code or even mission is an admirable achievement to mark the resolution of this crisis but I’m sure some of us did not achieve that at that time.
There are a considerable number of consumption scenarios here in what is often known as the identity crisis . Each one of them would take the best part of a chapter to do justice to so I will limit my comments by mentioning just a few of them. Clothes and other extensions of the body, including the skin 11 itself signal complex aspects of both social (We are like this) and individual (Is this me?) meaning. They are also part of the apparatus we use to social reference our position relative to others as status indictors, both upwards (I aspire to be like you) and downwards (I‘m much better than you). And once we are locked into position we navigate using our wardrobe as a compass. 12 We look good and people tell us that both by their behaviour and with their words. Keep buying and everything will be alright. If it wasn’t for that pesky adolescence. Because my identity is changing and so do my purchase patterns with the consequent overdraft and maxed out credit card. I need to eat and drink differently, socialise with others, get a new phone to compete with my new best friends and what’s cool anyway? These are some of the consumption consequences of being an adolescent.
Most writers on the psychology of development will start with birth or conception and when they get to adolescence then that’s it—job done. Why? Because the child is adult now and thinks, feels and behaves just like us. Piaget regarded formal operational thinking as the pinnacle of human achievement when we could think abstractly. Well Piaget might have thought that but Erikson certainly didn’t and there’s more after fidelity is achieved. So on we go.
There are three main stages that Erikson uses to describe the life course beginning in one’s 20s. For adults, mapping out a rigid sequence provides a hostage to fortune as individual adults are so different and each life story involving different cultures and an immeasurable range of experiences is unique as we know from our fascination with narratives in novels, films, and blogs. And yet we are moving toward something apart from death or maybe the term should be—before death. If we describe this using descriptive stages then we may not be doing justice to the variety of changes that people move through at that time in their life so we have to be careful. So I would suggest they could be seen as three shifting plates that we walk on in sequence as we get older. This may not be what Erikson himself thought, as the model with its dynamic of contrasts followed by resolution has provided a good account up to now as well as being premised on a classic account of change (see section on “Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis” in Chapter 2). Here they are with no age bands. I shall describe them first.
Intimacy Versus Isolation
Young adulthood according to Erikson is when participants are ready for marriage, as having a mature sense of identity means that both parties can experience the mutuality both physical and psychological that comes with that union. In other words two people seeking to find themselves as individuals within a marriage is a recipe for disaster as each partner would then want the freedom to explore their own developing identities. A successful marriage is built on the basis of two people who have resolved identity with role confusion by achieving fidelity (in Erikson’s sense of the word) and from that can explore intimacy fully as they each have found their individual self. 13
It would be difficult to transplant Erikson’s ideas from the middle and later decades of last century to parts of the world now. In many countries like the UK, marriage is one option among many and physical intimacy is no longer monopolised by heterosexuals. 14 The boundaries between genders are becoming less socially well-defined and trans-sexuality and bi-sexuality are legitimate and celebrated forms of relationship alongside the well-established homo- and hetero-versions. Sexual pleasure takes many forms and can be found being expressed in culture in various ways. For some people physical and sexual intimacy is one aspect of consumption although the paid for versions are not as common as other bought services and are regarded as inappropriate, unethical and also immoral by many. Gift giving 15 is acceptable however and the psychological foundations of reciprocity and exchange that characterise this practice are often linked to intimacy. One caveat however. My comments about the nature of sexual and intimate relations in parts of the world by some people in the twenty-first century are purely descriptive and I make no moral judgments about any person who finds intimacy within or outside marriage. Statistically if you are walking down a random street in England or Wales then, ignoring children less than 16 years of age, if you stop and ask a passer-by if he or she is married or in a civil partnership the probability that person would have that status would be about 0.5 and the probability they are unmarried is approximately 0.3. 16 I would not advise this course of action.
Generativity Versus Self-Absorption and Stagnation
Generativity is a term which could suggest an optimistic springtime of life when new ideas, career advancement 17 and fresh relationships are bursting out all over. However although it is a term that is frequently used by those who use Erikson ’s model the author himself restricted the idea to the generation of children (Erikson, 1963, p. 276). Which in itself can be rewarding and open one’s mind to new horizons 18 as one identifies with the growing child. The argument is clear: Raising a child and guiding and identifying with this new member of the group will generate a view of life and the world which is the antithesis of self-absorption and stagnation. There are cultural pressures especially in countries like the US for you to find yourself and dream the impossible dream together and these need to be resolved before generativity is fully achieved. Generativity is a powerful idea and has been taken up by others commenting on Erikson’s work. For a start it is not limited to just those who are in the stage of adulthood and Busch and Hofer (2012) discuss it in the context of adolescence. It is certainly relevant in old age ( Hofer, Busch, Au, Šolcová, Tavel, & Wong, 2016) as grandparenting is becoming an essential element of boomer activity. Consequently there has been an attempt to define and expand the idea. For example, as I’m sure some of you might have noticed from even this cursory summary of Erikson’s work, the development of women in the lifespan has been neglected and it has been assumed they go through the same stages as men. Gilligan (1982) suggested that the resolution of identity and intimacy might be achieved by women at the same time in the life course. It is becoming
apparent that the insights and power of Erikson’s analysis remain but there is much more variability in his theory which of course any writer that claims to speak on behalf of humanity must eventually acknowledge as it is one of the ways that theories themselves grow and develop. Another example can be found from a study by Lawford and Ramey (2015) where generativity was found in emerging adults and adolescents and celebrated as a ‘coming of age’ experience of making a difference not just to them but how they viewed humankind as well, when helping in a community camp for example. The borrowing of concepts from Erikson and using them in other contexts might be frowned on by purists who wish to preserve the original framework proposed by Erikson but theories are not sacred. Another example is the operationalisation of generativity as a scale 19 where participants check a list of statements on the criterion of this event happening to the participant. Some readers will welcome this as a step forward for research whereas others might wince at the very idea.
The other pole of this pair is a state of affairs where the participant(s) in a relationship are self-engrossed and unable to develop generativity . I think it is now recognised that cultural values are important in promoting and exaggerating this concern for the individual—the ‘me’ inside all of us. We live in society where living your dreams, making your choices are all that matters and the goal of self-advancement rather than the betterment of humanity drives many of us including our leaders on the international stage. So it’s not difficult to adopt that self-centred way of thinking and feeling in your daily life. It’s the resolution of the two facets of generativity and self-absorption/stagnation that produces a mature generativity.
Ego Integrity Versus Despair
The last stage is dominated as one might expect by the imminence of death and intimations of one’s own mortality . Decline both physical and mental is well-represented in the literature on old age although recently the journals appear to have provided us with a more optimistic picture. I find for example in the 2017 issues of The International Journal of Aging and Human Development papers on subjective well-being in the elderly, grandmothers’ sensitivity toward their grandchildren, civic engagement of older adults , romantic relationships in older women, older adults’ casino gambling behaviour, and friendship and care arrangements. There is still some doom and gloom in the pages of these journals as older adults do have health and psychological problems and journals are read by those who are in the caring professions and need to know, but the image of the older person as an active agentive adult is quite visible there.
Death is around us, both represented and real. The media carry it for real in the news, and we watch it and take it in as part of the licence we give ourselves to suspend disbelief in films and the TV we watch in our home . The adolescent has quite likely experienced the loss of a grandparent and the experience can be potentially disruptive to the dynamics within the family especially if the deceased has had a close mutual relationship with her grandchild and sometimes friendships and understandings have evolved between the two that do not involve the parent (Abeles, Victor, & Delano-Wood, 2004). Unfortunately there is not much research in this area (Abeles, et al., op. cit., p. 236) although it can be the first occasion the child encounters such a loss of a close person and the associated rituals of grieving and disposal. For the older person, funerals change from being an unusual event to one with that becomes more regular and predictable and attending the ceremony associated with it becomes routine. One can’t help but wondering if it’ll be ‘my turn next’. Although being older doesn’t necessarily mean one’s health worsens, there is an aging process that is recognisable. Here’s a few of them from Howieson (2015). Human information processing slows down. Holding many bits of information in your mind at the same time becomes more difficult. It’s also tricky for an older person to recall new information, pictures in particular so that a 70-year-old will perform 25% worse than an 18-year-old. The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (almost remembering a word) is a lot more common after 70 years of age. Another symptom is when you go off to get something from upstairs but you get distracted by someone on the stair so after that you can’t remember what you were going to get! Going downstairs to the place you started off from can prompt your memory as the original setting primes 20 the recall. Problem solving is more rigid now you’re older. Your strategies don’t change that much so you tend not to modify them and are unable to ‘tune in’ to the parameters of a particular situation. I shall be returning to ‘near the end matters’ (the ambiguity is intentional) with more in Chapter 12.
Faced with these signs and signals for a future which, even for those with religious faith, is a great unknown, we are faced with the last great crisis where painful feelings come to the surface but wisdom can emerge from the conflict. As Shakespeare put it in Sonnet 30 in lines 1–5:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste
So you experimented, tried, failed, and screwed up. What a mess! You may intone the mantra ‘with the benefit of hindsight…’ but it’s still there. This feeling of disgust can express itself as self-contempt according to Erikson (Crain, 2011, p. 295). Erikson had described ego integrity as an acceptance; something that was inevitable (1950, p. 268) and later we hear that it’s coherence and wholeness (1950, p. 65). Many older people are going through an inner struggle to achieve this blend of acceptance and integrity but we don’t see them like that as we can only see the stereotype of old age. It’s a common misconception that angst is monopolised by the young and that older people are always serene and wise and allowed to be grumpy only occasionally.
Stereotypes of older people have been researched for a long time and even in one of the earliest studies (Schmidt & Boland, 1986) a surprisingly detailed stereotype emerged. The negative characteristics were clustered into eight main types 21 : shrew/curmudgeon; recluse; nosy neighbour; bag lady/vagrant; despondent; mildly impaired; vulnerable; severely impaired. Positive characteristics were: ‘John Wayne’ conservative; liberal matriarch/patriarch; perfect grandparent; sage. These stereotypes are recognisable over 40 years on and if we remove the rather passive inmates of a retirement home (those who are: despondent, mildly impaired, vulnerable, and severely impaired) then I can see these stereotypes still in films and books.
Resolution of the conflict between ego integrity and despair goes behind the masks and roles in which we cast our older generation. And out of this flows—wisdom. If that is the prize before the end then we need to be told how to achieve it. Using reminiscence as part of reviewing your past life, thinking about the unresolved conflicts, the guilty secrets and attempting to achieve mental closure about the past is one solution and Taft and Nehrke (1990) showed that it can be effective.
Consumption in Stages 6 Through 8
Adult consumption practices should be informed by Erikson’s stages which I’ve outlined above and although we are dealing here with a massive spectrum of consumers across the world from different cultures and ages whose only common feature is that they are adults, it should be possible to identify some trends. But for each individual consumer the route to old age described by Erikson is not necessarily the route that person will follow. All cultures should be addressing the same issues as Erikson described: A mature sense of intimacy with bonds characterised by fidelity ; generativity and the next generation of children; and finally a resolved approach to the dilemma of death . These three sets of achievements described above are part of your culture’s prescription for living and dying and, according to Erikson social expectations are designed to help us through them.
For the younger adult in stage 6 a lot of the act of consuming goods and services is concerned with the acquisition of goods together and sharing the experience of preparing a home , buying stuff, sharing tastes, preferences and fashions and in many cases ‘learning to love’ the consump
tion habits and choices of the other. Compromise, digging one’s heels in, yielding and moving on are all stages in getting to know the other and eventually synthesising not just a modus operandi but a mature mutuality between two people. One aspect of this is the use of material objects, how we relate to them and incorporate them into our lives together and it is I think a sadly neglected aspect of human relationships. Because some of the best metaphors for compromise, an essential component for living both socially and sociably, are not found in language but in how we relate to objects, often in the most mundane circumstances. Young couples are told to tell all—to have no secrets and talk to each other what each one is feeling 22 from moment to moment. This may be textbook counselling following Jourard ’s principle 23 that self-disclosure leads to intimacy but language can be slippery and contrived whereas what you do spontaneously can be all revealing. Washing dishes, folding clothes, using the remote control for TV and other parts of ordinary life offer opportunities for collaborative action and these can tell you whether you get on or not and are as informative as the detailed non-verbal records of people communicating in a synchronised mutual way, or not as the case may be. There has been some work in this area looking at financial management by couples in various kinds of relationships (see for example, Burgoyne , 2004; Burns , Burgoyne, & Clarke, 2008; Burgoyne, Clarke, Reibstein, & Edmunds, 2017) but more work in this and different consumption ecologies would be welcome.
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