This stage does not normally arise before mid-life. What has previously been suppressed or unrecognized due to self-certainty and conscious cognitive and affective adaptation to reality is now integrated into self and outlook. In this "second naïveté", symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings. The past has to be newly reclaimed and reworked, opening up to the voices of the deeper self. In particular, this includes critical recognition of the myths, ideals and prejudices that one's nurture within a particular class, culture, religion or ethnic group has built deeply into the self-system, one's social unconscious. This stage knows the sacrament of defeat and that commitments and acts may be irrevocable. The boundaries of self and outlook that the previous stage sought to clarify are now made porous and permeable. There is awareness of the paradox and truth of apparent contradictions so that one strives to unify opposites both in mind and experience. Vulnerability to the truth of those who are "other" is generated and maintained. There is commitment to justice beyond the confinements of tribe, class and so on, and there is a readiness to be close to what may threaten self and outlook, which may be new depths of spirituality and religious revelatory experience. In the knowledge that life is more than half over, there is a readiness to spend and be spent in the cause of others' generating identity and meaning.
Here the new strength is an ironic imagination which can see or be in the powerful meanings of one's self or one's group and at the same time recognize their relativity, that they are partial and distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality. The danger is that paradoxical understanding of truth may lead one one to be paralyzed by passivity or inaction, with concomitant complacency or cynical withdrawal. Both one's own and others' symbols, myths and rituals can be appreciated due to having been grasped by the depth of reality to which they refer. Having been apprehended by the possibility and necessity of inclusive community of being, one is vividly aware of the divisions in humanity. But there is still division in one's self as one lives and acts between the untransformed world and transforming vision and loyalties. This may lead to the radical actualization of universalizing faith, stage 6.
Stage 5 in the system of faith development described by James Fowler. Together with the previous stage (individuative-reflective) it can be related to the 'rights of others' level of moral development of Lawrence Kohlberg, the genital stage of Sigmund Freud and the genital religion of Heije Faber. Together with the following stage (universalizing faith) it can be compared with the abstract thinking of Piaget (also together with the previous two stages), the 'universal principles' level of moral development of Lawrence Kohlberg and possibly with the maturity (ego integrity versus despair) stage of psycho-motor development of Erik Erikson and the world view of broken myth and use of symbols of Paul Tillich.
