This is the “characteristic self” that I earlier mentioned. When a person’s accumulated developmental experience is relatively good—never perfect, but good enough—our characteristic self provides us, in Erikson’s words, “a sense of being ‘all right,’ of being oneself, and of becoming what other people trust one will become.”6 When our characteristic selves shift later in life, it is because new life experience has engaged earlier resolutions that left us with some vulnerability. If our characteristic selves are not changing in response to new experience, it is because we have stopped learning
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