Identity: Youth and Crisis - Comprehensive Notes
Erik H. Erikson: Identity, Youth, and Crisis - Comprehensive Notes
Overview
"Identity: Youth and Crisis" is a collection of essays by Erik H. Erikson focusing on the concept of identity crisis, particularly in adolescence. Erikson emphasizes that identity is a complex process residing both within the individual and their culture. The essays explore identity formation, confusion, and the impact of social and historical contexts on the individual's sense of self. Topics range from individual struggles to social order, creative confusion in famous lives, race, and changing gender roles.
Identity: A Multifaceted Concept
Definition and Scope
Identity is both profoundly mysterious and universally present, deeply rooted within the individual yet intertwined with communal culture.
Shifts in culture inevitably lead to new questions of identity, prompting Erikson to comment on social protests and evolving gender dynamics prominent in the 1960s.
Evolving Report
The essays represent two decades of clinical and theoretical work, not a systematic theory, but an evolving report that examines identity across diverse contexts.
Subjects Explored with Examples
Creative Confusion and its Importance
The book delves into the "creative confusion" experienced by figures like George Bernard Shaw and William James.
These figures illustrate the struggles and resolutions in forming a solid individual identity, particularly in adolescence and early adulthood.
Individual Struggles and Social Order
Explores the connections between an individual’s identity crisis and the broader social order.
Addresses how personal struggles reflect and are influenced by societal norms, expectations, and values.
Race and the Wider Identity
Examines the effects of race on identity and the challenges faced by individuals in minority groups in forming a cohesive sense of self within a dominant culture.
Womanhood and the Inner Space
Discusses evolving gender roles and how they impact a woman’s understanding and acceptance of her identity in personal and professional spheres.
Erikson's Other Works
References to other notable works by Erikson, including "Gandhi's Truth," "Childhood and Society," "Young Man Luther," and "Identity and the Life Cycle."
Nun-hab ich mich verstanden? - The Core Question of Identity
Federn's Influence
Erikson reflects on his teacher Dr. Paul Federn, particularly Federn's concept of "ego boundaries,"
Admits the difficulty in fully understanding oneself, mirroring Federn’s question: "Nun-hab ich mich verstanden?" ("Now—have I understood myself?")
Indispensability in Context
Identity is best explored by establishing its necessity across various contexts, as offering a single definition is not possible.
Clinical Observations and Human Development
Role of Clinical Worker
Erikson's discomfort in publishing clinical observations outside professional circles.
He acknowledges the appropriation of his work by students and readers, necessitating a revised review of his findings.
Student Curiosity
Students show a determination to understand human deviation and variation, seeking detailed information for identification, empathy, and distance.
Reprints and Revisions
Essays and papers are ahead in suggestiveness and behind in established ground.
Revisions reveal shifts in tone and emphasis depending on the audience and context.
Historical Change and Re-evaluation
Terms and Trends
The appeal of "identity" and "identity crisis" during the two decades of the book's writing is discussed.
The need to evaluate thinking in the light of historical change is crucial.
Fads and Violence
Only a long look past fads and antics can reveal age-old messages brought to attention by today’s youth.
The problem of street violence and the role of young leaders call for careful attention.
A Team Effort
Collaboration
Acknowledgement of preparatory work by Joan Erikson and Pamela Daniels.
Austen Riggs Center
The book is a witness to joint work at the Austen Riggs Center, where Joan Erikson established a novel “Activities Program” for patients.
The program tests and promotes the inner resources of young people in acute crisis.
Dedication to Friends
Robert P. Knight and David Rapaport
The book is dedicated to Robert P. Knight and David Rapaport, who profoundly impacted Erikson's work.
Austen Riggs Center
The Field Foundation provided the initial grant for the study of Identity at the Austen Riggs Center.
Erikson also acknowledges support from the Ford Foundation and the Foundations’ Fund for Research in Psychiatry.
Identity: A Prologue
History of the Concept
Reviewing the concept of identity also means sketching its history.
In the twenty years since the term was first employed, its popular usage has become so varied that the time may seem to have come for a better delimitation of what identity is and what it is not.
Ambiguity of the Term
“Identity” and “identity crisis” have become terms that alternately circumscribe something so large and so seemingly self-evident that to demand a definition would seem petty.
Clinical and Social Usage
The term "identity crisis" was first used for a specific clinical purpose in the Mt. Zion Veterans' Rehabilitation Clinic during the Second World War.
Young patients can be violent or depressed, delinquent or withdrawn, but theirs is an acute and possibly passing crisis rather than a breakdown of the kind which tends to commit a patient to all the malignant implications of a fatalistic diagnosis.
Assertions of Identity
William James
Asserts what identity feels like through William James, in a letter to his wife, describes a sense of identity.
It is both mental and moral in the sense of those “moral philosophy” days, and he experiences it as something that “comes upon you” as a recognition, almost as a surprise rather than as something strenuously “quested” after.
Sigmund Freud
Asserts a unity of personal and cultural identity rooted in an ancient people’s fate, in an address to the Society of B’nai B’rith in Vienna in 1926.
Fundamental Statements
Dimensions of Identity
Poetic spontaneity and trained minds exemplify the main dimensions of a positive sense of identity almost systematically.
The term ‘identity’ in a central ethnic sense includes a sense of bitter pride preserved by his dispersed and often despised people throughout a long history of persecution.
Minimum Requirements for Fathoming Complexity of Identity
Psychological Terms
Identity formation employs a process of simultaneous reflection and observation, a process taking place on all levels of mental functioning.
Environmental Considerations
Traditional psychoanalytic method cannot quite grasp identity because it has not developed terms to conceptualize the environment as a pervasive actuality.
Radical Awareness and Change
Recognition and Relativity
Witnesses to a radically different awareness of the relation of positive and negative identity only have to change our historical perspective and look to the Negro writers in this country today.
Youth and Today
Youth of today is not the youth of twenty years ago. This much any elderly person would say, at any point in history, and think it was both new and true, But here we mean something very specifically related to our theories.
Bisexual Confusion
While at one time we cautiously tried to prove to sensitive young people that they also hated the parents they depended on, they now come to us with an overtly ugly or indifferent rejection of all parents.
Responsibility of the Older Generation
Diminishing Parental Sanction
Parents often impress the young as having remained overgrown boys and girls themselves, taken up with a world of gadgetry and buying power.
Principal Contemporary Sources of Identity Strength
Economic, religious, or political sources are allying themselves with ideological perspectives.
Sources of Identity
Technological
Discusses how the majority of youth derive a certain strength of identity from technological expansion, but also ties to old fashioned ideals which leads to tension between generations.
Ideological, Neohumanism
opposition to thoughtless mechanization goes together with a dislike of regimentation and of the military kind of enthusiasm, and with a sensitive awareness of the existential individuality of anyone in the range of a gun sight.
The Polarization of Identities
Division and Differences
Youth, in all its diversities, will share a common fate, namely, a change in the generational process itself.
The relative waning of the parents and the emergence of the young adult specialist as the permanent and permanently changing authority is bringing about a shift that places all older identities in deadly danger.
Sociogenetic Evolution
Man's Past to Future
Reverts to man’s past. and this time to a very long time span in his development, namely, sociogenetic evolution—with a brief glance back to the Garden of Eden.
Pseudospecies and Mortal Division
Man as a species has survived by being divided into what I have called pseudospecies.
But there are also “pseudo” aspects in all identity which endanger the individual.
Foundations in Observation
Individual Case Histories and Understanding
Psychoanalyst does provide the individual with an understanding that, in spite of the apparent chaos, patterns of inner adjustment are knowable; also that unconscious material can be brought to reason and within the grasp of the individual's will.
Relevant Social Meaning
Emphasis on how social factors come to a bearing in human life from birth onward, and the way in which our patients must not just be treated from the point of view of their case histories but be understood in terms of the social meaning of these case histories, lest our very treatment (especially in the hands of zealous adherents will have distorting effects.
Group Identity and Ego Identity
Group-Psychological Phenomenon
The growing child must derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience, his ego synthesis, is a successful variant of a group identity.
Subjective Aspect
Concerns more than the mere fact of existence; it is, as it were, the ego quality of this existence. Egoidentity then, in its subjective aspect, is always changing and developing.
Social Meaning
when the hero of the Sioux sun dance, at the height of the religious ceremonial, drives little sticks through his breast, we find both instinctual and social meaning in his extreme behavior.
On Submarines
On submarines the emotional plasticity and social resourcefulness of the crew are put to a high test.
Ego Pathology and Historical Change
Unconscious Hitler Youth
Example of ex-German soldier whose son, though never formally indoctrinated, adopted elements of Nazi ideology, revealing the unconscious influence of historical prototypes.
The Unconscious Associations of Evil
The unconscious evil identity, that which the ego is most afraid to resemble, is often composed of the images of the violated (castrated) body, the ethnic out-group, and the exploited minority.