The Role Of Caregiver-Infant Relationship In A Child’S Development According To Erik Erikson’S Psychosocial Theory

Based on Erik Erikson’s first stage of psychosocial development - trust versus mistrust, the emotional bond between children and caregivers is a crucial aspect to a child’s development of an internal working model. An individual’s internal working model explains one’s personality, expectations and knowledge of self and others. During this stage, infants face the developmental challenge of learning to trust the external world. In other words, they are tasked with developing a sense that the world is a safe place (Erikson, 1995; Louw & Louw, 2009). If caregivers respond to their infant’s needs in a consistent and predictable way, the infant develops a sense of basic trust and this lays the foundation for the capacity to have hope in the face of adversity (Carr & McNulty, 2006). Throughout Aileen’s childhood, she was abandoned by her biological mother and was faced with isolation and physical and emotional abuse by her grandparents which were meant to be her primary caregivers (Myers, Gooch & Meloy, 2005). With the abandonment and the abusive relationship faced by Aileen as a child, she might be unable to develop a secure foundation of trust. Hence, in Aileen’s case, she might have developed an internal working model that causes her to view herself as unlovable, the world around her as unsafe and the people around her as unreliable and cold (Shipley, 2001).

The rejection by her peers, her grandparents, and her own biological mother resulted in an entire network of failed connections, and thus the need for complex coping skills emerged. In response to being treated poorly and not being cared about, Aileen externalized these feelings of herself in the way that she began to treat other people. For instance, when it was realized that nobody would take care of her, Aileen’s primary concern became taking care of herself (Arrigo & Griffin, 2004). This could explain aspects of her egocentrism personality and lack of remorse for stealing from others. Aileen prioritized her own well-being above all others, and viewed the world as a hostile and dangerous place, because that was what her earliest childhood experiences of it had been. With that view in mind, she might have mentally detached from her physical self and objectified her body as a making money tool. This can be seen when she was able to “disassociate herself from her body; to blank off emotions” when she started selling herself to peers in exchange for money and cigarettes (Russell, 1992, p. 13).

Aileen was born into a divorced household where her mother abandoned her and left her under the care of her grandparents. However, Aileen was severely abused by her grandfather, while her grandmother turned a blind eye to the constant abuse, and emotionally neglected her granddaughter (Arrigo & Griffin, 2004). Erikson argued that the quality of the primary caregiver- infant relationship (in this case, between Aileen and her mother) plays an important role in the resolution of this crisis (Swartz et al. , 2008). It is plausible that in the absence of mother’s care and a conflictual home environment, it may have posed a threat to Aileen’s ability to resolve the trust versus mistrust developmental crisis. More specifically, with the absence of basic sense of trust in the self and the world, she might have internalized messages of viewing herself as worthless and unlovable; an object of abuse, rather than a whole person deserving of love.