Levinson's Stages of Adult Development Explained

Introduction: Foundations of Stage-Based 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. Humans obviously 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 essentially continuous process, but researchers on human development have generally 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 Intellectual Context and Key Influences

Levinson's model of human life development was derived in important ways from that of Erik Erikson, who was a colleague of Levinson's and who had developed a parallel model thirty years before Levinson joined the 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 led 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 positively 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 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 shaped by his or her social and physical environment. Among the most salient aspects of that social environment, Levinson argued that religion and social status were among the most important influences. He 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 in which he was writing, as American social and political life was awakening to the racial dynamics of society.

Stable and Transitional Periods: A Defining Feature

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: fluctuation between stable and transitional periods. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it is during Levinson's stable periods that individuals make their most important and far-ranging decisions and choices. During transitional periods, individuals are at the balancing point between the end of one stage and the beginning of another. Levinson's model stressed that this transitional point — a kind of psychological and emotional borderland — is as important to acknowledge as the stages themselves.

Levinson's model also posited 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 primarily 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 concentrated on 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 subject to fundamental change.

Levinson did not believe this to be the case. His work therefore 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.

Pre-Adulthood and the Early Adult Transition

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 those of Freud, Piaget, and 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 developmental 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, running from age seventeen to twenty-two, marked primarily by the individual's shift from a reliance on relationships inside the family to those outside it. These relationships include the relationship that the individual has with himself or herself, a relationship that begins to be redefined during this period. While a child sees himself or herself in terms of relationships with family members through age seventeen, from age seventeen to twenty-two the individual's primary relationships begin to be with people outside the family.

Conclusion: Levinson's Contribution to Lifespan Psychology

Levinson's model emphasizes both the stability and the fluctuations of healthy development. Unlike previous analogous models, he stressed the importance of understanding how individuals move from one life stage to another. While other psychologists and psychiatrists had neglected to explore the dynamics of the spaces between one stage and the next, Levinson helped both scholars and individuals see how movement between stages provides a constant thread extending over the entire lifespan.

While life is full of changes that cannot be reversed as we age in a single direction, Levinson reminded us that we are also constantly balancing the vectors of those changes against the constant undulations of transition and integration.

References

Capps, D. (2004). The decades of life: Relocating Erikson's stages. Pastoral Psychology, 53(1), 3–32.

Kittrell, D. (1998). A comparison of the evolution of men's and women's dreams in Daniel Levinson's theory of adult development. Journal of Adult Development, 1(3), 135–147.

Levinson, D. J., Darrow, C. N., Klein, E. B., & Levinson, M. (1978). Seasons of a man's life. New York: Random House.

Levinson, D. J., & Levinson, J. D. (1996). Seasons of a woman's life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Newton, P. (1994). Daniel Levinson and his theory of adult development: A reminiscence and some clarifications. Journal of Adult Development, 1(3), 135–147.