Life after age 50 is no longer a staircase leading downward, as in the Pennsylvania Dutch cartoons of life span development. Rather, Eriksonian development can be conceptualized as expanding ripples in a pond. Over time the adult social radius expands through the mastery of four tasks: identity versus identity diffusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and integrity versus despair. On the basis of empirical data from Harvard’s Study of Adult Development, I have added two more tasks—career consolidation and "keeper of the meaning"—to Erikson’s four (52) (F2) and demonstrated their sequential nature. Mastery of such tasks appears relatively independent of education, gender, social class, and arguably, culture (53).
In such a model the social radius of each adult developmental task fits inside the next. First, the adolescent must evolve an identity that allows him or her to become separate from the parents, for mental health and adult development cannot evolve through a false self. The task of identity requires mastering the last task of childhood: sustained separation from social, residential, economic, and ideological dependence on one’s family of origin. Such separation derives as much from the identification and internalization of important adolescent friends and mentors as it does from simple biologic maturation (54). For example, our accents become relatively fixed by age 16 and reflect those of our adolescent peer group rather than the accents of our parents.
Then adults develop intimacy, which permits them to become reciprocally, and not narcissistically, involved with a partner. To many young adults, to live with one other person in an interdependent, reciprocal, committed, and contented fashion for years and years may seem neither desirable nor possible. Once achieved, however, the capacity for intimacy may seem as effortless and desirable as riding a bicycle. Sometimes the relationship is with a person of the same gender; sometimes it is completely asexual; and sometimes, as in religious orders, the interdependence is with a community. In different cultures and epochs, mastery of intimacy has taken very different guises but "mating for life" and "marriage-type love" are tasks built into the developmental repertoires of many warm-blooded species, including our own.
Career consolidation is a task that is usually mastered together with or that follows the mastery of intimacy. Mastery of this task permits adults to find a career as valuable as they once found play. On a desert island one can have a hobby but not a career, for careers involve being of value to other people. There are four crucial developmental criteria that transform a job or hobby into a career: contentment, compensation, competence, and commitment. Not only people with schizophrenia but also individuals with severe personality disorder often manifest a lifelong inability to achieve either intimacy or sustained, gratifying employment. Such individuals rarely enjoy a GAF Scale score over 65.
Mastery of the fourth task, generativity, involves the demonstration of a clear capacity to unselfishly care for and guide the next generation. Existing research reveals that sometime between ages 35 and 55 our need for achievement declines and our need for community and affiliation increases (55). Depending on the opportunities that the society makes available, generativity can mean serving as a consultant, guide, mentor, or coach to young adults in the larger society. Generativity reflects the capacity to give the self—finally completed through mastery of the first three tasks of adult development—away. Its mastery is strongly correlated with subsequent mental health in old age (8). For in old age there are inevitable losses, and these may overwhelm us if we have not continued to grow beyond our immediate family.
The penultimate life task is to become a keeper of the meaning. Like grandparenthood, this task involves passing on the traditions of the past to the future. Generativity and its virtue, care, require taking care of one person rather than another. Keeper of the meaning and its virtues of wisdom and justice are less selective; for justice, unlike care, means not taking sides. The focus of a keeper of the meaning is with conservation and preservation of the collective products of mankind—the culture in which one lives and its institutions—rather than with just the development of its children. Clearly, caretakers and grandparents are not mentally healthier than caregivers and parents. The distinction is only that grandparents are usually better at the tasks of keeper of the meaning than are 30-year-olds.
Finally, in old age it is common to feel that some life exists after death and that one is part of something greater than one’s community. Thus, the last life task is integrity, the task of achieving some sense of peace and unity with respect to one’s own life. One’s social radius may expand to embrace the whole world. Erikson described integrity as an experience that conveys some world order and spiritual sense. "It is the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle and of the people who have become significant to it as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions" (1, p. 143).
Of course, healthy adult development does not follow rigid rules, nor are butterflies healthier than caterpillars. Some individuals, often because of great stress, tackle developmental tasks out of order or all at once. Beethoven enjoyed a brilliant committed career but never enjoyed intimacy.
The research agenda for the maturational model is the same as for positive psychology—to provide such humanistic concepts of adult development with more operational, empirically grounded, prospectively derived, and cross-culturally validated definitions of maturational tasks and then to demonstrate their predictive validity.
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