Acquiring Wisdom: Ego Integrity versus Despair

AS MOST OF US ON THIS IGNATIAN CAMINO ARE OVER THE AGE OF 65, we are at the eighth of Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development—ego integrity versus despair. This stage is associated with aging and approaching death. The task of this stage, which occurs in Late Adulthood (from age 65 until death), is to gather up the wisdom learned from earlier psychosocial stages of life and apply that wisdom in the world. Failure to master the eighth stage results in a failure to acquire wisdom. Erikson proposed that such failure would result in the opposite of wisdom which he saw as disdain—a contempt for life, one’s own or anyone else’s.

Wisdom or disdain?

Wisdom is the ego strength that results from the resolution of the dilemma of ego integrity versus despair. At this stage, a person looks back at his or her life. Integrity comes from an overall acceptance of his or her life and achievements. Inevitably there will be some episodes of his or her life story that will elicit pain and shame when remembered, and others that will elicit joy and fulfillment. The task a man or woman faces at this stage is to accept and rejoice in the good decisions taken and the love shown during life, and to be reconciled to any bad choices and failures to love. A man or woman who is basically satisfied with his or her life will be ready to face death.

Erikson states that integrity and wisdom are the result of, “…the acceptance of one’s own and only life cycle and of the people who have become significant to it… free of the wish that they should have been different, and an acceptance of the fact that one’s life is one’s own responsibility.”[1]

Despair

According to Erikson, despair results from dissatisfaction with one’s life as one considers aging and approaching death. A person may realise that he or she is not able to “start over” at this stage in life. A person may feel as though he or she has “run out of time” to complete the milestones of previous stages of development. This anxiety reflects both the fear of dying and the fear of not achieving life’s goals:

Despair expresses the feeling that time is short, too short for the attempt to start a new life and to try out alternate roads to integrity. Such a despair is often hidden behind a show of disgust, a misanthropy, or a chronic contemptuous displeasure with particular institutions and particular people.[2]

Despair is suffering without meaning

Since suffering is an inevitable part of life, one must try to find meaning in it. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl writes, “despair is suffering without meaning.”[3] According to Frankl, “Life can be made meaningful … through the stand we take toward a fate we no longer can change (an incurable disease, an inoperable cancer, or the like).”[4] Since human beings have free will, they can choose to find meaning in their suffering. What makes the difference between despair and meaning? Frankl answers: The “attitude we choose toward suffering.”[5] He explains:

Caught in a hopeless situation as its helpless victim, facing a fate that cannot be changed, a person still may turn his or her predicament into an achievement and accomplishment at the human level. He or she thus may bear witness to the human potential at its best, which is to turn tragedy into triumph.[6]

Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, recalls the negative and positive responses of prisoners to suffering in the Nazi concentration camps. He says that a person “may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or, in the bitter fight for self-preservation, he or she may forget human dignity and become no more than an animal.”[7] When a person’s situation or circumstance changes for the worse, then his or her attitude must change for the better in order to accept it. The kind of person that one becomes in suffering is the result of “an inner decision,” not the result of the suffering alone. To paraphrase Frankl: What kind of attitude will I have toward my suffering? Will I become bitter or better by it?

A study ranking traumatic events in old age lists first, death of a spouse, then being put in an institution, the death of a close relative, major personal injury or disease, and finally losing a job and divorce. Erikson expands on this list and describes how the elderly can experience diminishment in each of life’s eight stages. “Old patients seem to be mourning not only for time forfeited and space depleted but also… for autonomy weakened, initiative lost, intimacy missed, generativity neglected—not to speak of identity potentials bypassed or, indeed, an all too limiting identity lived.”

He sees the reminiscing so characteristic of later years as a looking backward which is set in motion by looking forward to death. It is as if nature equips us to integrate life by remembering experiences to garner wisdom rather than despair. The elderly person also instinctively knows the wisdom of beginning with positive memories of “the good old days,” because negative memories without love’s positive foundation can lead to despair, the trap of this stage of life.