e while that is the last thing on their minds. In spite of the attitude Nicole sometimes manifests at home, she is more family-oriented than her friends and can be talked into going with her father and his wife to a James Taylor concert. When the father, after talking her into this, has to cancel for business reasons, she again feels abandoned and goes to a club in a bad part of town with her friends. She meets David there and is charmed by him. Nicole is the vulnerable young girl who is seeking a connection with others who can help her develop and understand her development. she is seeking her own identity, and she is vulnerable to a manipulative person like David for that very reason. He gains her trust by asking for it again and again--he tells her to jump from the ladder and trust him, and she does. She tells him about her mother and how when the two of them lived alone, she--Nicole--felt like she was taking care of her mother instead of the other way round. Now, living in her father's house, she is dependent and seems to feel that she should be given more independence, like she had before. The sort of person David seems to be is a surprise to her--she says he is not like she thought he would be, probably based on seeing him playing pool that afternoon. His manipulation of her is more apparent in retrospect than at the time, for he could be the sort of person he seems and could be the sweet young man he seems.
Nicole is at a developmental stage in her psychology where she is seeking an identity. Such developmental stages have been explained in different ways by different theorists. Erikson's approach is a psychosocial theory of development which describes a series of eight stages in the development of the individual throughout life. This is based on the interaction of biological, psychological, and social processes, and it is the interaction of these processes that accounts for the "psycho"
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