Up to this present day and age, there have been many different theories and approaches on how the common man develops. Of these, the most reasonable and recognized ones seem to be Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development, Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development, and Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial Development. These three theories all approach this topic in very different ways, yet they all may be correct.
Firstly, we have look at how these approaches are similar. The most obvious one is that they all show how the common human being develops, but not in the same way. Also, Freud’s theory and Erikson’s theory are similar in several ways. Both stress and show the emotional dynamics of social development. Basically, this is saying that they both believe that learning the rules of society are different than learning how to walk or how to swim. Also, they both present four similar stages in he beginning, oral, anal, phallic/genital, and latency. Furthermore, they both talk about anxiety, clinical behavior, emotional behavior, abnormal behavior, and neurosis/psychosis behavior. For an specific reason, which will be explained later on, Piaget’s stages are very different, hence the miniscule similarity, if there are any.
Secondly, we look at how these models differ. Piaget’s is clearly the most different. His model is composed of four, well researched stages, sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operations, and finally, formal operations. What these stages talk about are how the human being develops cognitively or how their thinking develops. This is different, as opposed to Freud’s and Erikson’s, which are mainly physically.
On the other hand, Erikson’s though similar to Freud’s, has some differences. His theory doesn’t stop at latency, unlike Freud’s, or Piaget’s, which doesn’t even include any same stages. It goes on with puberty, young adulthood, adulthood, and maturity, otherwise known as old age. Also, Erikson’s model presents stages that can be “passed” after resolving the issue of their stage. Freud’s and Piaget’s say that they grow into them, meaning they don’t really have control on how fast they progress, but they do have control on whether they do want to progress.
As we can see, these approaches all are capable of being perfectly right, even though they approach the topic in a different way. It’s like saying someone took one road to get somewhere, and another took a different route and both got at the same destination at the same time. There wasn’t a “wrong” road, they were both valid. Just as in this example, the three models are all capable of being valid.