Question

Generativity: The Key to a Happy Life Read the following features of Generativity Versus Stagnation:

• The psychological processes that promote generativity are person-environment interaction and creativity. Generativity relates to the concerns of people within their community. People want to contribute to their community through their work, parenting, and creative efforts. Contributions improve the quality of life for community members.

• The virtue or ego quality that arises out of generativity is caring. People in the stage of generativity care about themselves, their families, their communities, and the peoples of the world.

• Erikson believed that without generativity people stagnate. Stagnation suggests a lack of growth. Those unable to cope with life experiences may become stagnant.

• Narcissistic people—those who care mostly about their own satisfaction—tend to focus on creating personal wealth or accumulating things for themselves. They may be perfectly happy, but psychologically stagnant, which puts them at risk for difficulties as they face old age and death.

• Chronically depressed people have difficulty promoting generativity , because they fail to see the worth of their work and behavior. • The psychological pathology that arises from stagnation is rejectivity—that is, to reject or refuse to embrace others, which may lead to hostility toward others. This hostility may be toward individuals in the family, or other families, or other community groups, or other cultural groups. Erikson was concerned that a high level of rejectivity within a society promotes societal stagnation, which may in turn cause groups to dominate or promote a desire to annihilate other groups.

QUESTION: Generativity is threatened for many people when there are large economic downturns and job losses. Do you think there are social structures that could prevent societal stagnation?

Answer 1

Generativity is one of the most important developmental stages of Erik Erikson. If a person develop through the previous stages successfully, they could exhibit generativity. Although there are different factors that contribute in helping one enter this stage successfully such as a supportive family environment, social support, economic support etc., there are other people who struggle to step into this stage because of various other reasons which diverts them to stagnation such lack of family and social support, poverty, health issues etc.

Social structures contribute a lot in deciding one’s generativity. Only a peaceful mind can produce productive results. If one struggles to make both the ends meet, lose one’s job, discriminated in the society based on race, ethnicity, colour etc. one won’t be able to be creative and move on to generativity thus ending up in stagnation. So, social and economic structures play a major role in deciding whether one would move to generativity or stagnation.