Modern psychology more and more insists that the development of maturity and personal integrity is a lifelong process. Thus, it would be fallacious to assume that an adult, human personality can be formed by the eighteenth year (or thereabouts). On the contrary, there are certain–and necessary–formative periods in early, middle, and late adulthood. These periods involve specific crises. And such patterns will terminate, in certain patterns of resolution or maladjustment. It was Erik H. Erikson who added this insight to the theory of the "stages of psychosocial development. " Building on these Freudian levels of childhood and adolescent development, Erikson distinguished significant and equally critical stages in the development of the adult. Barry McLaughlin, a young Jesuit psychologist, presents here the applications of Erikson's thought to the religious life. Erikson's thought to the religious life. Erikson's theory bears several obvious and rather pointed implications to religious commitment. What Erikson calls the "crisis of identity" takes on a definite of his vocation. The religious is thus a person who experiences simultaneously a developing, evolving, and intensely dynamic process of spiritual maturity. Because the crises of adulthood (intimacy, generativity, and integrity) are "spiritual" as well as psychological, they now require characteristic resolutions. The processes of spiritual maturity, McLaughlin argues wisely, must be resolved with grace, if real spiritual and psychological growth is to be realized. When the supernatural and natural orders are ideally integrated, grace and natural orders are ideally integrated, grace and nature co-operate. What results is a fully formed, Christian adult, a saint by all means.