Trust and dependency

Although this stage is related with early childhood, the years in which adult strengths and weaknesses and also attitudes to religion arise and develop, the adult whose psychological development is mature will never have lost the essential childlike qualities, including the ability to express him or herself with spontaneity, a freedom or playfulness in activity and awareness and feeling responding with immediacy to what life brings. This is the ability to live unconsciously and unselfconsciously within the rich environment of one's own illusions, the level of magic and myth.

This is the first of three stages of belief described by Michael Jacobs and which relates the oral stage of Sigmund Freud with the oral religion of Heije Faber and the levels of primal faith and intuitive-projective faith of James Fowler. It is also related to the pre-conventional moral judgement of Lawrence Kohlberg and the pre-conscious liberal world view of Paul Tillich.