DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

This literature review will act as both a contextual framework within which the results
of my investigation may be understood and interpreted, and will also illuminate the
process by which initial ideas and concepts were developed into actionable research
questions.
2.2 Development
In attempting to understand a construct, etymology can often provide opening
clues. The word development comes from the Latin suffix “de” meaning “out of” or
“from”, and the Latin word “velo” which means cover or hide. It literally means to
bring out of hiding. In etymological terms, although rarely used as such, it is the
antonym of “envelopment”, which means to hide or cover in. This suggests that what
emerges during the course of development is lying latent, hidden, in a potential or
ideal state. Development cannot occur down an arbitrary or random trajectory, for to
say that something has developed is to say that it has improved in some way, or come
closer to an ideal state (Sugarman, 1986). Change can happen in many directions,
both developmental and regressive, and to label change in a person as “development”
requires a judgment that the observed change has moved a person closer to some
reference point that defines what ‘developed’ should be (White, 1975). This
judgmental aspect of labelling development is probably clearer on a socio-economic
level – to call one country “developed” and another country “developing” requires an
explicit set of criteria against which to make this judgement, and an ideal that
constitutes a developmental endpoint or developmental direction. Development, then,
is characterised by change in a definite direction, and for the developing human being
the direction can be conceived of as proceeding along two parallel lines, which run
harmoniously in the same direction, one implicating the other. The first is toward
complexity, and the second is toward equilibrium.
Development of the human being moves toward complexity by way of two
interacting processes operating on a physical and psychological level: differentiation
and integration (Allport, 1961; Lewin, 1931; Csikszentmihalyi, 1992, Bronfebrenner,
1979, Deci and Ryan, 1991). Differentiation involves an undifferentiated fused unity
breaking into units separated by boundaries, so that an internal structure emerges.
Integration refers to the co-ordination of these separate units into functional groupings
or systems (Von Bertalanffy, 1969). In biology, the developing embryo starts as one
cell that then differentiates into a blastocyst of cells, which carries on until it reaches
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