Erik Erikson Adolescence Quotes

Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.

Erik Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.2 Psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes of solitude in much the same way. Storr says that in accounts of the creative process, “by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping.... It is a state of mind in which ideas and images are allowed to appear and take their course spontaneously . . . the creator need[s] to be able to be passive, to let things happen within the mind.”3 In the digital life, stillness and solitude are hard to come by.

The first of these is what we may call a polarization of sexual differences (V.6), i.e., the elaboration of a particular ratio of masculinity and femininity in line with identity development. Some of our patients suffer more lastingly and malignantly from a state not uncommon in a milder and transient form in all adolescence: the young person does not feel himself clearly to be a member of one sex or the other, which may make him the easy victim of the pressure emanating, for example, from homosexual cliques, for to some persons it is more bearable to be typed as something, anything, than to endure drawn-out bisexual confusion

These observations can underscore their sense of loneliness. The psychologist Erik Erikson said that adolescents’ essential task is to develop a sense of identity. They rebel against, but also look to, their chief role models, their parents, as they ask questions about who they’ll become. Among adoptees who lack access to their personal history, this process is complicated by the knowledge that no matter how they are loved, wanted, and wished for, they understand that a crucial part of themselves is lost. This can become a source of identity confusion, and some researchers say it results in shame, feelings of abandonment, embarrassment, and low