Markers of Psychosocial Maturation(ORIGINAL PDF)

“This book is long overdue. Stage theory in all its forms has dominated and skewed the way human development has been conceptualised for far too long and this book repositions human development as a life-long dialectical process. In doing so, the author draws on a wide range of sources and by using everyday terminology he manages to make it easy to relate to and apply to everyday life.”

—Martin Adams, author of An Existential Approach to Human Development (2018). 

This book advances an integrative approach to understanding the phenomenon of psychosocial maturation. Through a rigorous, dialectically-informed interpretation of psychoanalytic and humanistic-existential-phenomenological sources, Mufid James Hannush distils thirty essential markers of maturity. The dialectical approach is described as a process whereby lived, affect-and-value laden polar meanings are transformed, through deep insight, into complementary and integrative meta-meanings. The author demonstrates how responding to the call of maturation can be viewed as a life project that serves the ultimate purpose of living a balanced life. The book will appeal to students and scholars of human development, psychotherapy, social work, philosophy, and existential, humanistic, and phenomenological psychology.

Mufid James Hannush was Associate Professor of Psychology at Rosemont College in Rosemont, USA. Professor Hannush is the author of Becoming Good Parents: An Existential Journey (2002).