Identity: Problem and Catchword
Wrong, Dennis H.
LIONEL TRILLING'S STORY "Of This Time, Of That Place" begins with a young English professor assigning to his freshman class as their first theme the writing of an essay on "Who I am and Why I...
...The civil rights movement initially seemed to promise viability and iden 18 Erikson, op...
...Writers influenced by existentialism complain that modern society, far from preventing identity-formation by failing to provide secure social roles, depersonalizes the individual by forcing him into standardized roles and treating him as an altogether replaceable integer in a mass...
...The loyalty of the executive to his company is ultimately either a compulsive, willed loyalty or a qualified and provisional one that is different in kind from the loyalty of the vassal to his liege...
...while simultaneously taking into account the resonance they have acquired, as their creators obviously could not...
...little men" and thus they promote conformism...
...Technical means and calculations perform the service2 6 Social science itself has made no small contribution to the de-mystification of social processes and, like the physical sciences, it has often been used to promote ends and to justify moral and political creeds at odds with those cherished by its creators...
...I am not objecting to these terms as such—we owe most of them to our very greatest thinkers in the social sciences and they have become popular precisely because they truly convey something of the quality of life in modem society and express live historical emotions...
...Today someone like Ralph Ellison, with his passionate insistence on his right to his own individuality as it has been shaped by the cultural resources of Western civilization as a whole, strikes black power militants as being positively old-fashioned and out of touch—if they do not simply dismiss him as an Uncle Tom...
...Tertan rejects the socially established coordinates of time and place and even of family, and seeks a deeper, more individual and at the same time less history-bound definition of himself...
...The very rigidity and artificiality of formal manners permits the individual to maintain his inner life intact behind the barrier they present and gives an unmistakable significance to breakthroughs to intimacy (recall the meaning of achieving a linguistic "thee-thou" relationship with someone in the great 19th-century European novels) . In America, on the other hand, quite apart from the blatant commercial exploitation of pretended intimacy (pseudo-Gemeinschaft, t, as Merton has called it), an apparently intimate rapport is established so quickly that one cannot be certain it means anything beyond the moment...
...It begins: "I think, therefore I am, but who am I? Tertan I am, but what is Tertan...
...and introd...
...Opportunities for mobility and the array of life-styles popularized by the mass media are often held responsible for delaying the achievement of secure personal identity by keeping modem men in a state of perpetual adolescence, fostering an illusory sense of limitless possibilities that survives well into the adult years...
...IV CONSIDERATIONS such as these have been advanced by ideological conservatives in defense of hereditary social hierarchies and restrictions on personal freedom...
...12 Ibid., p. 208...
...traditional sexual and familial roles become ambiguous, while depressions, wars, and cold wars destroy continuity of understanding between generations...
...In its purer forms existentialism, however, purports to describe not merely man as victimized by modem society, but the human condition in general...
...Casebeer, on the other hand, is obviously a conformist, a square, a budding "organization man," who buries his true self by identifying himself totally with his social roles as scion of the Casebeer family, son of college graduates and a potential graduate himself, heir of a respected businessman, urban Midwesterner...
...cit., pp...
...LIONEL TRILLING'S STORY "Of This Time, Of That Place" begins with a young English professor assigning to his freshman class as their first theme the writing of an essay on "Who I am and Why I came to Dwight College...
...12 If I understand Erikson correctly, identity includes both what the person really is—how in psychoanalytic terms his ego has synthesized his previous identifications and social roles—and his perception of himself, whether positive or negative...
...This rebuttal is unconvincing, not merely because analysts who hold a wide variety of theoretical and ideological positions agree on essentially the same diagnosis of the ills of American society, but because the fact that greater freedom and individuality are possible under conditions of relative class 23 Robert K. Merton, Mass Persuasion, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946, p. 142...
...Such a facile response to the contrast between the two students is little more than an ideological reflex that does scant justice to the subtlety and moral ambiguity of Trilling's fictional exploration of Tertan's fate in the prosaic setting of an American college...
...Yet Negro writers have protested, like Ralph Ellison, that the Negro is the "invisible man," or, like James Baldwin, that "nobody knows my name...
...Alienation," "anomie," "mass society," "the loss of community," "the overdeveloped society," "organization man," "status-seeking," "soulless bureaucracy" are other terms in this language...
...but simul 3 E. V. Walter, "Mass Society: The Late Stages of an Idea," Social Research, XXXI (Winter, 1964), pp...
...Indeed, both David Riesman and William H. Whyte have understood, unlike many of those who parrot them, that other-direction as a way of life and managerial efforts to create loyal organization men owe a great deal to popularization and application of the findings and principles of modem social science...
...The thrust of Arendt's argument is "conservative" while Marcuse's is "radical," although such simplifying labels do both writers an injustice...
...The difficulty of achieving stable identity is increased by the sharp discontinuities in the life-cycle of Americans that result from rapid social change, from mobility, and from an imposed age-graded schedule of involvement in successive specialized and segregated institutional milieus—school, college, military service, work...
...DENNIS H. WRONG to create a master loyalty to the corporation or the suburban community...
...Political propaganda, mass production, and the mass media presuppose a public that is merely an aggregate of identical consumers or 14 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, New York: Philosophical Library, 1956, P. 59...
...Louis eighteen years ago and we still make our residence there...
...The contemporary reader is likely to see Tertan as a seeker after "authentic selfhood," a quest that for him, as Trilling brilliantly shows, verges on the psychotic...
...Work roles are increasingly perceived as routines that fail to relate the worker to the larger community in any significant way...
...My father is Arthur J. Casebeer and my grandfather was Arthur J. Casebeer before him...
...All social identities are masks, false-faces that stifle the lonely freedom and uniqueness of the person...
...Nor does it destroy personal identity by eliminating choice and the possibility of "role distance...
...Hereditary statuses, precisely because they represent an unalterable social fate for the individual, may threaten personal identity less than statuses that are subject to the tensions and agonies of choice and for which the individual, having chosen, must prepare himself in advance by what sociologists have called "anticipatory socialization...
...Existentialist discussions of identity appear to be at sharp variance with the sociological 11 Ibid., p. 209...
...At most, social identity is 6 Erving Goffman uses the term "situated roles" in Encounters, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961, p. 96...
...One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such 24 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, New 25 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man...
...To Sartre, the man who identifies himself totally with his social role is guilty of "bad faith" in seeking to destroy the freedom of his "being-for-itself" by grasping at an illusory "being-in-itself...
...By analyzing the very cheapening process to which the language has been subject as an intelIectual and social phenomenon in its own right, we may be able to arrest it and thereby advance the debate over the situation of man in our time...
...It has acquired the same aura that clings to "mental health" or "normality" in popular usage...
...25 Arendt is more concerned with what has been lost in the passage from the stable, stratified, faith-centered societies of the past, while Marcuse's central aim is to reassert the liberating potentialities of science and technology— including social science—that have been used to create weapons of destruction, useless consumers' goods, and bureaucratic monoliths...
...DENNIS H. WRONG the result of successful identification with another person, group, social role, or movement...
...A sense of personal identity is more easily safeguarded by formal manners and strict 20 See Ellison's intense discussion of this issue in Shadow and Act, New York: Random House, 1964, especially in the essay "The World and the Jug," pp...
...24 Marcuse, too, is aware of the loss of psychological depth in our "one-dimensional" world dominated by a purely functional rationality of anonymous and imper sonal social controls, in which even the formerly explosive, reality-transcending energies of sexuality and artistic creativity are tamed in the service of a system that becomes all the more difficult to challenge because it tolerates them...
...He becomes the mere appendage of a technical-bureaucratic machine...
...8 He regards identityformation as a distinct psychic mechanism that "begins where the usefulness of identification ends...
...I can it "ideological," using the word pejoratively, because "identity crisis," "authentic selfhood," and "conformism" belong to a whole language of social criticism that has recently 2 Ibid., pp...
...What E. V. Walter has said of the idea of mass society applies more broadly to our language of fundamental social criticism as a whole: It cultivates the muddle ground between fact and supposition that is frequently occupied by metaphysic and myth...
...21 Also, frequent and intimate personal contacts between members of different social classes and status groups have often been the rule where status rank is hereditary, as Philippe Aries and Philip Mason have recently shown to have been the case in Medieval Europe and 18th-century England respectively22 Thus in contrast to the negative racial identities of modern times, the person of low social rank in these societies was less likely to become invisible and nameless behind a derogatory stereotype...
...331-344...
...As John Schaar observes: With all its richness of sociological and psychological detail, the philosophical theory of alienation refuses to concede that alienation can be reduced to an exclusively sociological problem and understood solely in sociological terms.16 If one similarly pushes the sociological critique of modem society to its limits, it is hard to see why the writers who make use of it so frequently deplore conformism, organization men, and the search for roots in suburbia...
...The existentialist insistence that man makes himself by his choices has never been more apposite than to the situation of modern man...
...3 But this language is able, because of the very evocative power it possesses, to elicit indiscriminate negative responses to modern life...
...Social analysts have often observed that greater individuality, a heightened sense of identity, and a richer inner life may flourish where social constraints are more binding and inescapable than under the regime of aimless freedom enjoyed by so many contemporary Americans...
...A sense of identity may include a regretful recognition of limits: recognition that the self one has become precludes some experiences, some kinds of mastery, has closed off what were once open possibilities as now lying beyond the range of personal capability...
...21 Luckmann and Berger, op...
...Our consumption-centered economy encourages Americans to retreat into a "privatized" life of affluence in which" they are apathetic about public affairs, yet modem society is also seen as the seedbed of fanatical mass movements whose followers willingly submerge their private lives in dedication to a collective goal...
...by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, p. 139...
...Identity to Erikson means personal identity and is something more than mere social identity or the subjective reflection of a social role...
...Of this time, of that place, of some parentage, what does it matter...
...He makes it plain, however, that he does not mean confirmation of the individual's membership in a group or recognition that he has attained a new social role, but rather confirmation of the unique being that the individual has forged out of the identifications of his childhood and adolescence...
...Identity, therefore, is not the same thing as "self-concept" or "self-image," 8 Erikson, op...
...13 Ibid., p. 314...
...What Max Weber called the "disenchantment of the world" applies to the realm of society as well as to the realm of nature: There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play but rather...
...22 Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962, pp...
...The diagnosis is familiar...
...9 Identity is the unique selection made by the individual from all of the significant identifications of his past...
...ton: Beacon Press, 1964, pp...
...IDENTITY: PROBLEM AND CATCHWORD mysterious powers existed...
...This tradition appears to be directly at odds with the sociological critique that regards identity as the result of anchorage in a group or social role and condemns the atomization, rootlessness and anomie of modem life...
...158-159...
...After puzzling a few minutes over the strange mixture of fractured syntax and verbal richness of Tertan's essay, Professor Howe picks up a second student paper and proceeds to read: "I am Arthur J. Casebeer, Jr...
...Even 4 Erikson, op...
...sciences, psychiatry, education, child-rearing, and attitudes toward sexuality have been an assault on the repressiveness, narrowness, intolerance, and hypocrisy of the faiths and moral codes by which they lived...
...9 Ibid., p. 159...
...BosYork: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959, p. 295...
...The very consciousness of the existence of alternatives that are faster and mechanically more efficient alters the experience, no matter how intensely the wider social consequences of the alternatives may be deplored...
...We know now that even totalitarian regimes are less successful in reshaping men in their own ideological image than we once thought...
...7 Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, "SocialMobility and Personal Identity," European Journal of Sociology, V (1964), pp...
...Can we create a society that does not mythologize its own processes of social control and allows men to choose their own identities without making life appear a senseless routine...
...The fragmentation of the civil rights movement, however, reflects (among other things) growing conflict between the claims of personal and social identity among Negroes themselves...
...28-29...
...The first of the student papers the professor examines is that of a tall, gawky, badly-dressed but passionately if confusedly eloquent boy who has previously caught his attention...
...Negro identity in America is, of course, a negative identity in Erikson's terms, and, without accepting the romanticism of Mailer and Kerouac, it may for that very reason be for some of its bearers less stifling of personal identity than approved roles...
...My mother is Nina Wimble Casebeer...
...I was born in St...
...Was the feudal vassal's loyalty to his liege different in kind from that of the modem executive to his company...
...For if identity is the result of firm group attachments and rootedness in established social roles, what is wrong with efforts 16 John H. Schaar, Escape from Authority, NewYork: Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 225...
...The sociologist, on the other hand, has been unable to advance much beyond specifying the formal requirements such an order must meet: minimal..consensus, a degree of continuity in socialization, the regulation of potentially destructive group conflicts, etc...
...adolescents these days know that "they are supposed to have" an identity crisis and compares the "strenuous overtness" of their search for identity with the earlier emergence into general awareness of sexual wishes that formerly remained unconscious and gave rise to hysterical symptoms.2 Almost unavoidably, one today sees Trilling's two student protagonists as having arrived, tentatively at least, at contrasting solutions to the problem of identity...
...But they are likely to lack firm attachment (or anchorage) to any one of them, nor do they possess a secure total status in society cutting across their various "situated,"e or segmental roles, such as that of "aristocrat" or "peasant" in the more rigidly stratified society of the past...
...taneously he is too tightly controlled by giant bureaucracies and manipulated by the mass media...
...WHY DO PEOPLE suffer from identity crisis or identity confusion in modem industrial society...
...But Marcuse insists that man must complete his "technological project" by realizing the historical alternative to the present: "the planned utilization of resources for the satisfaction of vital needs with a minimum of toil, the transformation of leisure into free time, the pacification of the struggle for existence...
...Maurice Stein, a sociologist, remarks that: "It almost seems as if community in the anthropological sense is necessary before human maturity or individuation can be achieved...
...Such protests are, of course, by no means confined to existentialists...
...although many writers have dealt with it as if it were...
...rules of etiquette governing one's relations with others than by the ready friendliness, lack of reserve, and casual intimacy with strangers that have long been recognized as characteristically American...
...Personal identity is roughly synonymous with individuality...
...14 Their betrayal of identity lies in their effort to be their social role in the same way that "this inkwell is an inkwell, or the glass is a glass...
...We have lost the 26 Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, transl...
...Both of them are college graduates and my father is in insurance...
...Such men have handed their lives over to others when they imprison themselves in the "dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavour to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor...
...Casebeer, while "less interesting" than Tertan, "at least knows who he is," reflects Trilling's professor...
...Any stick to beat a dog with...
...But we cannot— even if we wished to—restore the mystery and absolutism of social control for the sake of enhancing identity, nor for the sake of anything else...
...And now the same fate threatens "identity" and "identity crisis," initially defined and analyzed so carefully and acutely by Erikson...
...Thus appropriations of the language of existentialism for attacks on the specifics of contemporary life are of doubtful justification...
...Yet Erikson rejects the equation of identify and identification from the standpoint of psychoanalytic theory...
...Yet the existentialist, while actively engaging himself in protests against social injustice and political oppression, usually describes only in negative terms the social order that might encourage men to make the most authentic choices...
...man is said to be alienated, rootless, and drifting in contemporary America...
...For that matter, why object, now that religious faith has lost its hold over men, to establishing a new consensus based on a secular ideology interpreted by a priesthood of state officials...
...Thus our society is charged with destroying the primordial bonds of community among men, while at the same time it is pilloried for promoting conformity and "togetherness...
...Nor is the existentialist who asserts that all socially-imposed conduct is alienating as ahistorical as he appears to be...
...Social identity is the social psychological counterpart of social role,–the role as viewed from the perspective of its incumbent rather than in relation to the larger system of roles to which it belongs...
...But popular social criticism, indiscriminately brandishing as weapons such terms as "alienation" or "materialism," rarely dispels the impression of inconsistency by systematically analyzing these possible connections between the various counts of the indictment drawn up against American society...
...III ULTIMATELY, there is a fundamental moral and philosophical conflict between the antinomian individualist and the sociological positions...
...It is a sensitive indicator of changes dimly perceived, and perhaps it is a proto-scientific formulation of truth, bringing to consciousness features of reality not yet substantial enough to be grasped by the methods of science...
...17 Although " David Riesman has frequently protested such an interpretation, readers of The Lonely Crowd have often understood it as an attack on other-direction and a eulogy of innerdirection...
...Thus those sociologists, who argue for the necessity of stable social roles, binding consensus, and firm intermediate group loyalties, are not in the end inconsistent when many of them refuse to applaud contemporary conformism, organization men, suburban sociability, and the "engineered consent" of the mass media or of totalitarian methods of control...
...5 What we must try to do is restore something of the analytical precision of the original terms...
...A word like "alienation" with its peculiarly rich sociological and philosophical heritage has become virtually shapeless in its current intellectual usage...
...338-339...
...Philip Mason, Prospero's Magic: Some Thoughts on Class and Race, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1962...
...After all, books of social criticism have been best-sellers and have often found an audience among the very groups whose way of life they attack—suburbanites, junior executives, the metropolitan middle class in general...
...And, anyway, communication between social scientists and a larger public is so rapid and extensive today that even the most and neologisms quickly reach a wide audience...
...11 WHEN VIEWED in this manner, the concept of identity becomes almost a synonym for "identification," with which it shares a common linguistic origin...
...Erikson observes that "the concept or at least the term identity seems to pervade much of the literature on the Negro Revolution in this country.°18 While he concerns himself " chiefly with problems of Negro identity, he also recognizes that the survival of racial oppression poses a challenge to white identities and provides opportunities to reshape them: "there is, in fact, more than poetic justice in the historical fact that many young white people who feel deeply deprived because of their family's `culture' find an identity and a solidarity in living and working with those who are said to be deprived for lack of such culture.19 The attitude of some writers and " intellectuals toward the Negro is also instructive...
...It arises from the selective repudiation and mutual assimilation of childhood identifications and their absorption in a new configuration...
...10 Erikson goes on to observe that identity requires confirmation by the society to which the individual belongs...
...The square is he who fails to realize the arbitrariness, the humanly invented character, of all social codes...
...True, it is a sociological commonplace that men play multiple social roles in modem society...
...The failure of society to provide the individual with "secure anchorage," as it is often put, in a social role is seen as the cause of the anxieties and identity crises from which we suffer...
...one can, , in principle, master all things by calculation...
...Earlier writers, including Durkheim, more often stressed the decline of a common, deeply experienced religious faith uniting people who differed widely in status, wealth, occupation, and even language...
...10 Ibid...
...One common answer is that society fails to provide them with stable social roles in which they can take pride and invest a large portion of their emotional energies and selfrespect...
...Even the experiencing of identity crisis is interpreted as a mark of spiritual depth: Erikson reports that "on occasion I find myself asking a student who claims that he is in an `identity crisis' whether he is complaining or boasting...
...The same applies to efforts to recreate social ties and identities that have the emotional power of the pre-bureaucratic past...
...Comparing two recent philosophical works analyzing modern technological society—Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man—one is struck by the underlying similarity of outlook shared by the authors in spite of obvious contrasts between their theoretical positions...
...cit., p. 295...
...The history of the social sciences sufficiently attests to the disastrous consequences of efforts to create a hygienic would-be "scientific" vocabulary free of all ideological overtones...
...Sociologists have perhaps preferred to adopt the term identity, not merely because it is briefer and more economical—such considerations hardly seem to have influenced their terminological habits in general—but because it lacks the special psychoanalytic connotation of identification...
...That the accusations leveled at modem society are inconsistent with each other is overlooked...
...IDENTITY: PROBLEM AND CATCHWORD tity to Negroes as individual human beings...
...An important connotation that it has in common with individuality is that of referring to an objective attribute of the person rather than solely to the idea he has of himself...
...Like existentialism, however, they stem from an antinomian, romantic individualist tradition that sees social controls and collectively-imposed patterns of conduct as the enemies of personal identity...
...He is blind to the fact that his social role is truly a role in the theatrical sense—something one plays at, not something that exhausts the definition of what one is...
...Moreover, if these values have truly been maximized, how account for the swelling chorus of discontent...
...5 Ibid., p. 230...
...409-410...
...To attribute complaints about modem life to disgruntled conservatives, disillusioned ex-Marxists, literary snobs, Europeans with an aristocratic bias or, more generally, "alienated intellectuals," is to ignore the resonance of the complaints in much wider circles...
...the emphasis on the consumption of trivia and the commercial provision of unimportant services and time-killing leisure pursuits that characterizes our advanced, "tertiary-stage" industrial economy, makes many occupational activities seem intrinsically debasing—one thinks of advertising executives, cocktail waitresses, or change-makers in Nevada gambling casinos...
...15 Ibid...
...207, 411-415...
...Conservatives and radicals, to be sure, often agree that equality of opportunity and material abundance have led to identity crisis, dehumanization, and cultural mediocrity rather than to freer, more creative, and more individualized lives for the majority of the population...
...However, even in psychoanalytic theory, identification is a socializing mechanism, in fact the primary socializing mechanism through which the superego itself is shaped and stabilized...
...Yet popular social criticism borrows freely from both perspectives, seemingly unaware of the contradictions between them...
...Now all of these charges may be true and their inconsistency apparent rather than real...
...DENNIS H. WRONG lessness, democratic culture, and high living standards is not the same thing as their actual realization...
...That a sense of identity is something more than a favorable self-conception needs stressing because identity has tended to become a value-charged, almost a charismatic, term, with its secure achievement regarded as equivalent to personal salvation...
...Arendt is full of misgivings about the world created by modem science and technology when contrasted with the preindustrial societies of classical antiquity and Medieval Christendom where men preserved a sense of limits in a world they did not regard as entirely of their own making...
...Thus some social analysts have treated the decline of hereditary social classes and the increase in mobility aspirations as the major cause of the individual's uncertain and fluctuating identity in modern society...
...cit., p. 228...
...cit., pp...
...Existentialist writers are primarily concerned with personal identity...
...Far from seeing identification with a social role as a prerequisite for identity, they see it as the ultimate death of authentic selfhood...
...she fears that "it is quite conceivable that the modem age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known...
...Nowadays its separate words frequently blur into a general hum of lamentation about the fate of man in modem society, in which each individual word loses its conceptual clarity in contributing to an overall tonal effect...
...Different charges may describe the behavior and attitudes of different segments of the population...
...And the usual riposte by defenders of contemporary American life is to label the critics reactionaries whose nostalgia for the past prevents them from enthusing over the vastly increased opportunities for freedom and individuality made available to all men, rather than to an upper-class elite alone, by democratization and technical progress...
...Under the worst conditions of oppression in the South it often became no more than a self-conscious mask worn in encounters with whites...
...Social identity no longer provides a protective barrier for personal identity...
...252-253...
...In effect, it equates identity with social identity and delineates the features of modern industrial society that prevent the establishment of firm, preferably life-long, social identities...
...I do not think the solution is to abandon words that have become blurred as a result of wide and rapid circulation...
...or there may be a temporal dialectic in which a particular response when played out is succeeded by an alternative reaction to basically unchanged social conditions...
...For he knows that only in the modern world of de-mystified instrumentalized social structures could he gain such insight into the human condition...
...As Erikson notes, the classic psychoanalytic terms are themselves subject to changing historical connotations "which range from what Freud called the `age-old ideologies of the Super-Ego' to the IDENTITY: PROBLEM AND CATCHWORD influence of contemporary ideologies...
...Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac are only the most extreme and most publicized celebrants of the greater vitality, inner freedom, and personal integrity often attributed to Negro life and personality...
...Trilling's story was published in 1943 before the terms "identity" and "identity crisis" had joined "neurosis," "alienation," and "mass society" as semantic beacons of our time, verbal emblems expressing our discontent with modem life and modem society...
...19 Ibid., p. 304...
...capacity to believe, or even to achieve a "willing suspension of disbelief" in the transcendental authority of society, just as we some time ago lost the capacity to believe in supernatural authority—which Nietzsche understood when he proclaimed the death of God...
...107-143...
...Thus, Orwell argued, the self-conscious effort of Medievalist and agrarian ideologues to eliminate modem technology from their lives and to live by handicrafts, relying only on human and animal labor power, is absurd...
...Self-image is more changeable than identity, lacking the "genetic continuity" Erikson ascribes to the latter...
...IDENTITY: PROBLEM AND CATCHWORD perspective that stresses the lack of consensus, the fragmented social structure, and the discontinuities in individual growth of modem society...
...That each concept has a rich and varied intellectual and ideological pedigree is forgotten...
...In his latest book, Erik H. Erikson, the creator of "identity" as a distinctive psychoanalytic and social psychological concept, has brought together in revised and reworked form all of his major papers on the subject.' Commenting on the promiscuous popularity the concept has achieved, he observes that i Erik H. Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis, New York: W. W. Norton, 1968...
...As has often been pointed out, much of both the language and the substance of modem social criticism is derived from, or is at least continuous with, the conservative critique of democracy and equality developed in the aftermath of the French Revolution...
...4 Far from advocating the avoidance of "richly suggestive terms," he suggests that "an awareness of the changing connotation of its most important terms is one of the requirements of a `self-analytic' psychosocial orientation...
...Its failures and the shift in the focus of protest from segregation in the South to conditions in the urban ghettos of the North have intensified efforts by Negroes to replace a negative group identity with a positive one, efforts that seemed exotic and cultist even a few years ago when the Black Muslims first received national publicity...
...But having drawn as sharply as possible the contrast between their critical perspectives on modern society, I shall now explore the sense in which both are true and complement one another...
...13 Yet, surely, one may wryly or rue " fully accept one's identity...
...Also, selfimage is closer to consciousness, whereas identity, while including "the conscious sense of individual identity," refers also to an "unconscious striving for a continuity of experience...
...DENNIS H. WRONG become widely diffused in our society, reaching well beyond academic, literary, and psychoanalytic circles...
...28 With the important exception of ra " cially persecuted minorities and the underclass of the permanently poor and unemployed, the absorption of individuality by social role is not an irresistible process but one that depends on the complicity of the individual himself: he chooses to be an eager role-player, to wear the uniform of the organization man, the happy consumer, or the hippie...
...Moreover, exposure to the mass media means exposure to constantly shifting fashions in life-styles...
...15 Sartre calls the man who thus tries to escape from his freedom and individuality a "salaud"—a French colloquialism which, it seems to me, is most accurately translated in this usage as "square...
...Personal identity may have been less threatened by the more custom-bound societies of the past in which social institutions and norms retained an aura of sacredness and "charisma" than by today's self-evidently man-made world of technological rationality and planned social organization...
...George Orwell once remarked that, even if one concedes the truth of the most extreme accusations of ugliness and human and natural destructiveness made against machine civilization, one nevertheless cannot travel to London by ox-cart with automobiles whizzing past and planes droning overhead, at least not in the same spirit that was possible before the invention of modern transportation...
...Yet our Victorian grandfathers were models of inner-direction, while the entire modem movement in the arts, social 17 Maurice R. Stein, The Eclipse of Community, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959, p. 248...
...For to the existentialist all social roles, all institutions, mores, and group loyalties are threats to personal identity—the rituals of the tribesman and the allegiances of serf and nobleman as much as the "alienated" work routines of the organization man or the frantic sociability of the suburban housewife...
Vol. 15 • September 1968 • No. 5
