How to Coach Yourself and Others Techniques For Coaching | Page 256

techniques, ability to work with processes and collaborations, etc). More detail is under 'Basic virtues'. Where passage through a crisis stage is less successful (in other words not well-balanced, or worse still, psychologically damaging) then to a varying extent the personality acquires an unhelpful emotional or psychological tendency, which corresponds to one of the two opposite extremes of the crisis concerned. Neglect and failure at any stage is is problematical, but so is too much emphasis on the apparent 'good' extreme. For example unsuccessful experiences during the Industry versus Inferiority crisis would produce a tendency towards being overly focused on learning and work, or the opposite tendency towards uselessness and apathy. Describing these unhelpful outcomes, Erikson later introduced the terms 'maladaptation' (overly adopting 'positive' extreme) and 'malignancy' (adopting the 'negative' extreme). More detail is under 'Maladaptations' and 'Malignancies'. In the most extreme cases the tendency can amount to serious mental problems. Here is each crisis stage in more detail. Erikson's psychosocial crisis stages - meanings and interpretations Erikson used particular words to represent each psychosocial crisis. As ever, single words can be misleading and rarely convey much meaning. Here is more explanation of what lies behind these terms. Erikson reinforced these crisis explanations with a perspective called 'psychosocial modalities', which in the earlier stages reflect Freudian theory, and which are paraphrased below. They are not crucial to the model, but they do provide a useful additional viewpoint. 'psychosocial crisis' / 'psychosocial meaning and interpretation modality' 573