Erikson and the Wild Strawberries Essay

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Pages: 7

Erikson and the Wild Strawberries In the Life Cycle Completed by Erik H. Erikson, Erikson talks about the stages in life those stages range from infancy to elderly age. The stages are basic trust vs. basic mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, initiative vs. guilt, industry vs. inferiority, identity vs. identity confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generatively vs. stagnation, and finally integrity vs. despair. In Wild Strawberries the character Isak Borg goes through all the stages that Erikson talk about in his book Life Cycle Completed and you get a visual understanding of what Erikson means about the stages. The first stage Borg goes through is integrity vs. despair, which is when he has a bad nightmare. In the nightmare, Borg is …show more content…
Borg’s mother tells Marianna to get a box that has stuff from her children in it and they through the stuff, and she lets Borg have a picture. Then Borg’s mother pulls out a watch and it is the one from the dream with no hands and it belonged to his brother, Sigfred. In this scene, the stage is integrity vs. despair, because it shows wisdom between Borg and his mother but also the distance of his mother toward her children. In this scene, Borg has three dreams. Borg goes the car and falls asleep and this is when the three dreams happen. The first dream he is sitting in the strawberry patch with Sara and she has a mirror, she keeps telling him to look in the mirror to see how old she is. Then she tells him he is too old and he will die alone, then she gets up to go get a baby. She tells the baby that there is nothing to fear that she will be there with him, and then she goes inside of a house. The second dream he goes to a house looks in the window and sees Sara and his brother. Sara playing the piano and when she finishes the song they get up and go eat dinner. The third dream he looks back through the window and then decided to knock. When he knocks a man opens the window and takes into what seems to be a classroom, he is taking an exam and the teacher ask him to look through a microscope, and he sees nothing. The teacher asks Borg what the stuff on the