African Musical Symbolism In Contemporary Perspective - Saoas.org

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so pave a quick route to the roles and obligations of manhood
and womanhood. These adult obligations not only include
familial ones but may also, in the case of males, involve young
age-set initiates going into battle or standing up to tyrannical
chiefs.
Freud considered that healthy children went through three
psychosexual developmental stages: oral (breastfeeding), anal
(potty training) and genital (procreation). Unhealthy
development occurs when a person gets stuck in one of the
infantile oral or anal stages. Erik Erikson, on the other hand,
divided human growth into eight psychosocial stages and in the
process coined the famous expression “identity-crisis” to
describe the adolescent one. The final and eighth stage of late
adulthood was the time of the appearance (or for some the nonappearance)
of what he called “ego-integration”.
Jung, also suggested major developmental stages. The first
starts with the infantile auto-erotic stage which at three or four
years old gradually leads on to the formation of the “adaptiveego
complex”, which is directly associated with self-awareness,
gender and willpower. However, unlike Freud’s concept of the
ego being the central point or “I” of personality, Jung’s adaptive
one is inversely associated with the unconscious Shadow and the
Anima (for a man) or the Animus (for a woman). Like Piaget,
Jung believes that during late adolescence the child ego
temporarily becomes less self-centred during an idealistic period
of altruistic aspirations and good works. But then the adaptiveego
reasserts itself again during the long stage of going to work
and competing to survive and generally getting on in life. It is
only when the zenith of life has passed, believed Jung, that
individuals may again start to feel dissatisfied with egoistical
achievements and there is a return to non-personal ideals. It is
during this Jungian final phase of development that the
emergence of a balanced Self can occur through a process of
individuation that will be discussed later.
Healthy psychological growth therefore, according to these
three psychologists, gradually moves in the direction of a more
egoless or less self-centred state; whether one calls it Piaget’s
“decentred self”, Erik Erikson’s “integrated ego” or Jung’s well-