Продуктивность или застой, инертность и самоуничижение.

Это годы середины жизни. Люди в это время переживают так называемый «кризис середины жизни», во время которого они переоценивают цели и достижения собственной жизни, осознают собственную смертность и ограниченность собственных возможностей.

Референтной группой в этом возрасте являются члены семьи, сослуживцы.

Согласно Эриксону, основной задачей этого возраста является разрешение кризиса «продуктивность против застоя».

 

According to Erik Erikson, the main task of middle adulthood is the resolution of the crisis of generativity versus stagnation.

Those who achieve generativity become less self-absorbed, more productive, and more concerned about being a productive worker, spouse and parent. And within that period, between the late thirties and early forties, creative people tend to make their most outstanding contributions to their fields.

Stagnation is a barren state, when the person stops or degrades in his development because of less interest to life, alcohol abuse or lack of creativity.

We often connect generativity with the parental status. It’s clear that parents may have more interests, following their children. But if those interests are connected with children’s life only, there is a danger of severe “empty nest syndrome” when children leave the house and begin their own life. So people have to have different interests to avoid such a kind of problems.

 

 

Stage 8. Integrity versus Despair (after 65 years).

 

The research found, that by 2020 one person in five on the Earth will be over 65. This increase in the elderly population brought new concerns about physical well-being as well as about psychological development in old age.

Erikson claimed that the main psychological task of late adulthood is to resolve the crisis of integrity versus despair.

A sense of integrity results from reflecting back on a meaningful life through a successful “life review”. It is a sense that one’s life has been lived productively. And that case the person feels satisfaction.

Despair – is the feeling that one’s life has had little purpose or meaning. If the elderly person evaluates his own life pessimistically, he fears unavoidable death more and more and feels despair.

In his concluding remark about this stage in the book “Childhood and Society”, Erikson wrote such words: “Healthy children will not fear life if their parents have integrity enough not to fear death”.

But death is a great problem of our life. As Benjamin Franklin observed in 1789, “in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes”. But we can at least improve the way in which we confront death.

Prior to the twentieth century, death was accepted as a public part of life. People died at home, surrounded and comforted by loved relatives. In contrast, the twentieth century has been characterized by the denial of death. And one of the symptoms of this denial is the isolation of the dying person.

Today people often die alone, in pain, in hospital wards, attached to life-support system. But last years we talk more and more about the hospice movement. The hospice provides comprehensive care for the dying patients and differs in several ways from the traditional twenties-century approach to dying.

What are the psychological experiences of the dying? They were studied by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (1969). She identified 5 stages experienced by terminally ill patients: (1) denial, (2) anger, (3) bargaining, (4) depression, and (5) acceptance.

At first, the patients deny their medical diagnoses, then become angry at their fate, then they bargain with God to let them live, then suffer depression at the thought of dying, and finally come to accept their impending (unavoidable) death. These stages are common, but Kubler-Ross has found that not all terminally ill patients go through all stages or go through them in the same order. But normally, she assumed, the person have to dye accepted it. And the task of all doctors and other medical stuff is to provide dying patients with a more dignified and human death, and their families with practical and emotional support.