Practice theory analysis in Levinson's seasons of a man's life

Levinson's Stages Of Development

The tendency for psychologists and psychiatrists to create narratives for human nature and development based on a stepwise model may derive formally from Sigmund Freud's work, but it is more fundamentally derived from commonplace experience. For humans obviously do shift from stage to stage as they mature, replacing one level of cognitive and emotional development with the next. or, rather, human development occurs across the entire lifespan. One could view this as an essential continuous process, but researchers on human development have in general found it more productive to view life as a series of discrete categories. This paper explores one of the most significant of these models of life development, that of Daniel Levinson.

Levinson's model of human life development was derived in important ways from that of Erik Erickson, who was a colleague of Levinson's, and who had developed a parallel model thirty years before Levinson joined the Harvard University faculty in 1950. Also on the faculty in the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations were Henry Murray, Robert White, Talcott Parsons, Gordon Allport, and Alex Inkeles (Newton, 1994). While Levinson's work was innovative and original in important ways, it was also a synthesis of the ideas that informed this avant-garde program, which lead the nation in truly interdisciplinary psychological work in the middle of the last century. Levinson's model focused on the ways in which people can develop in positive ways so that each individual can fulfill his or her potential.

While Freud's, and to a lesser but still important extent Erikson's, model focused on internal developmental stimuli -- based in an individual's physiology as it was affected by the individual's family of origin -- Levinson's model relied more on how the individual's life at any given stage was influenced and molded by his or her social and physical environment. Among the most salient aspects of that social environment, Levinson's model argued that religion and social status were among the most important influences. Levinson also acknowledged that race was one of the most important aspects of an individual's life experiences. He was one of the first psychologists to incorporate race so deeply into his model of human experience, which is hardly surprising given the time that he was writing in as American social and political life was awakening to the racial dynamics of social life.

The most important way in which Levinson's model departed from Erikson's is that his framework balanced the stepwise development that men and women went through as they aged with another dynamic of fluctuation between stable and transitional periods. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it is during Levinson's stable period that individuals make their most important and far-ranging decisions and choices in their lives. During individuals' transitional periods they are at the balancing point at the end of one stage and the beginning of another. Levinson's model stressed that this transitional point -- a sort of psychological and emotional borderlands -- is as important to acknowledge as the stages themselves.

Levinson's model predicated that an individual needed to complete the tasks of each stage before moving on to the next one. His model took the individual through the entire lifespan, as did Erikson's, although Erikson focused on the period of adolescence while Levinson's model emphasized each stage of life more equally (Levinson, 1978). In this sense, Erikson's model paralleled the work of Freud and Jean Piaget, who also focused on the period of adolescence. All three of these clinicians and theoreticians believed that the primary developmental processes were concluded at the end of adolescence and that while individuals were not stagnant after adolescence, they were far less fungible.

Levinson did not believe this to be the case. His work thus incorporated some of the most salient points of the focus on gerontological issues that were at the forefront of psychological and psychiatric research and practice around the middle of the last century. Levinson's model of adult development began with Pre-adulthood or the Early Adult transition, which extends from conception to age twenty-two. As such his model differs significantly from Freud's and Piaget's work as well as that of Erikson since it blends together the many changes that occur as an individual moves from infancy to adulthood.

Levinson was not dismissing the biological, cognitive, and emotional changes that occur from birth through the end of adolescence. Rather, he was arguing that all of these changes were part of a single development arc, the shift from the total dependence of the infant to the autonomy of the adult with a separate identity. This period was capped by the Early Adult Transition phase that runs from age seventeen to twenty-two, marked primarily by the individual's shift from a reliance on relationships inside the family to those outside the family. These relationships include the relationship that the individual has with himself or herself, a relationship that the individual begins to redefine during this period. While as a child an individual sees himself or herself in terms of the relationships between the ego and members of the family through age seventeen, from age seventeen to twenty-two, the individual's primary relationships begin to be with people outside of the family.

The next stage in Levinson's model he called early adulthood. This period runs from age seventeen to age forty-five and was marked by the attributes that serve a person establishing his career. The gendered pronoun is used intentionally here because Levinson's model was derived primarily from his interviews with men. While he and his wife (who was his colleague) would later interview women for their book on the stages of a woman's life, Levinson's concept of healthy development placed a strong emphasis on ambition and professional drive to succeed as well as the importance of managing personal obligations reflected the predominant social values of masculinity.

It is important to note that while Levinson acknowledged the importance of cultural and social context for the development of the individual, he was less aware of the influences on himself of his moment of history. Levinson used the norms for male development and social expectations as the norm for human development. Although he would later write a book on how women developed, his norm for behavior and development remained deeply engendered in male experiences, including his own (Kittrell,1998).

It should be noted that Levinson was as attentive to the obligations that men had to their families and communities as he was to the opportunities that they had. He recognized (as would most of his compatriots in the country of mid-century masculinity) that men's lives were both buoyed by and bound by their public lives. This period was bounded by the Midlife Transitional period of the years of forty to forty-five years of age.

This transitional age marked a distinct change from the period that preceded it as the individual began to shift his focus away from himself and the fulfillment of his personal ambition. This shift was accompanied, or perhaps facilitated, by a greater degree of reflectiveness and an enlarged perspective on the greater picture of family and community (Capps, 2004).

This period was followed by the phase of middle adulthood, running from age forty to age sixty-five. This period is defined, according to Levinson, by a gradual (for some people, although much more acute in others) decline in physical capabilities. This is also the phase during which many adults become grandparents and see the next generation possessed of the physical strengths that they themselves are losing. (for those who do not have grandchildren or other family members in the next generation such as nieces or the children of cousins, professional mentorship relations may fulfill the same function.) This can be either a painful or relatively graceful shift in self-conception.