The Resourceful Self
And a Little Child Shall Lead Them
by Donald Capps
Paperback (No longer our product)
(February 2015)
ISBN: 9780718893903
5.98 x 9.02 inches
Price: $30.00
In stock
A study inspired by the theories of developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, exploring how the emotional and spiritual resources of childhood offer insight into Jesus’s injunction to become like children.
Erik Erikson, best known for his life-cycle theory and concept of the identity crisis, proposed that we are comprised of a number of selves. In several earlier books, including ‘At Home in the World’, Donald Capps has suggested that the emotional separation of young children – especially boys – from their mothers results in the development of a melancholy self. In this book, Capps employs Erikson’s assignment of an inherent strength to each stage of the life cycle and proposes that the life-enhancing strengths of the childhood years (hope, will, purpose, and competence) are central to the development of a resourceful self, and that this self counters the life-diminishing qualities of the melancholy self.Focusing on Erikson’s own writings, Capps identifies the four primordial resources that Erikson associates with childhood – humor, play, dreams, and hope – and shows how these resources assist children in confronting life’s difficulties and challenges. Capps further suggests that theresourceful self that develops in childhood is central to Jesus’ own vision of what we as adults may become if we follow the lead of little children.
- By (author) Donald Capps
"The deep struggles of being human are enticed to come out and play with hopeful possibilities that are as real and human as the struggles themselves. They are already there, deep within - in humour and hope, in dreams and play. Donald Capps journeys intimately with Freud and Erikson to reach beyond and discover the resourceful self." Yolanda Dreyer, University of Pretoria, South Africa "With unsurpassed precision and characteristic hope, Donald Capps coaxes from Erik Erikson's clinical essays on children and young people a battery of psycho-spiritual resources for countering threats of the melancholic self. The reader closes this book with renewed vigour, encouragement, and good cheer for facing the day." Robert C. Dykstra, Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey "[Donald Capps] shows a deep knowledge of the corpus of Erikson's writings, not only of his major tomes but also of his selected papers and clinical essays on children and young people. This is vintage Capps, a view to a child's social development from a psycho historical viewpoint. This is a worthy book " Howard Worsley, in Theology, Vol 119, No 3
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