Problem: In three sentences summarize the paragraph to answer the following questions: what is Erikson's theory? Need Assignment Help?
Erik Erikson accepted many of Freud's general principles, but he gave more emphasis to the effects of the social environment on development. Forming a sense of identity involves defining oneself as a discrete, separate entity and addressing the questions "Who am I?" and "What will I become?" in terms of religious views, political values, gender preference, and occupational aspirations. This process is a major challenge in adolescence (Crocetti, 2017). Erik Erikson was one of the first psychologists to study adolescents' identity development (see Chapter 1). His fifth developmental stage focused on the search for a stable self-identity. Failure to achieve a stable identity, Erikson claimed, results in identity confusion-a state he illustrated with a line from Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, when Biff says, "I just can't take hold, Mom. I can't take hold of some kind of life." Although empirical support for Erikson's theory has been limited in part because of the difficulty of testing his ideas, his work has been an important catalyst for research and theorizing. Following Erikson's lead, James Marcia (1966, 1993) described a period during which adolescents experience a crisis of decision making when alternative identities are explored, options tried, and new ways of being are imagined. For example, an adolescent boy thinks about pursuing various occupations.