Identity, Individuation, and Intimacy

Introduction

Identity is a term that has been overused and needs careful consideration.
Erik Erikson is a key theorist of identity, emphasizing the identity crisis.
Identity is primarily an unconscious process that unites individuality and links the individual to the social world.
Identity provides a stable, consistent, and reliable sense of self in the world.
It integrates one's meaning to oneself and to others, matching self-perception with how significant others view them.
Identity preserves the continuity of the self, linking the past and the present.

Identity Diffusion

Identity diffusion involves a sense of not knowing who one is.
Feeling at the mercy of impulses, memories, and traits that lack coherence.
Identity allows people to organize and understand their experience and share meaning with others.
Values and ethics form the core of one's sense of identity.

Individual and Social Identity

Identity is interwoven with others, gaining meaning through contrast.
Discovering differences from others heightens the sense of individuality.
Example: A young woman with perfect pitch learns about her unique musical talent when she realizes not everyone can identify notes so easily.
Identity involves judging oneself based on values meaningful to those we identify with.
Within a professional community, individuals understand how they fit and are evaluated by shared standards.
Outside that community, they may be known and evaluated differently (e.g., as a doctor).

Identity Formation

Identity is continually refined as the circle of significant others and activities widens.
Identity formation occurs throughout the life cycle, starting just after birth and continuing into old age.
In psychodynamic terms, identity is a property of the ego that organizes experience, not a structure or content.
It's an amalgam of constitutional givens, libidinal needs, psychological defenses, identifications, interests, and social roles.
Identity formation is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with unique pieces for each person.
Natural talents, intelligence, social class, physical attractiveness, temperament, limitations, deprivation, and trauma all contribute.

Identification and Identity

Identity is formed through identification with others but is greater than the sum of these identifications.
Identification involves adopting aspects of admired or powerful people.
Identity formation transforms and assembles these identifications into a coherent whole.
Identification has limited usefulness as it only involves parts of others and doesn't create a fully functioning person.
Example: A woman enjoying cooking like her mother and baseball like her father doesn't define her identity until these pieces fit into an overall picture.
Identity includes and supersedes all previous identities.
Choosing an identity is gradual, with the self modified over time.

Dynamic Fitting

Identity is a dynamic fitting together of personality parts with social realities.
It provides internal coherence and meaningful relatedness to the real world.
Stating "I am a psychologist" is an occupational identity but doesn't define the overall identity unless it encompasses all aspects of the person.
Listing aspects like "I am a woman, a mother, and a psychologist" doesn't define identity without synthesizing these parts and understanding how the person experiences herself.

Social Role vs. Identity

Social role is a visible aspect of identity, available for study.
It's unclear how identity changes with social role fluctuations or whether social roles derive from identity.
Some people create social roles from a strong sense of who they wish to be, causing society to adapt to them.
Others choose social roles readily offered by their society.
Identity is largely unconscious and allows us to function automatically.

Moratorium Phase

We are most aware of our identity during the Moratorium phase (identity crisis).
In this period, we consider alternative selves and experiment with possibilities.
Once identity decisions are made, questioning fades, replaced by peace of mind, purposefulness, and mutuality.
Erikson viewed identity resolution as a stage-specific normative crisis in adolescence.
Identity issues are prepared before adolescence and refined afterward but take center stage during adolescence.
Before adolescence, aspects related to identity are ascribed (social class, family, school, religion).

Ascribed vs. Achieved Identity

In simpler cultures, identity remains ascribed throughout life, learning roles appropriate to a prearranged social niche.
In diverse cultures, choices are necessary to formulate identity.
At the close of adolescence, the young person establishes a place in the world, and society recognizes choices made.
Society provides a moratorium, a period of delay where the young person isn't taken seriously, allowing experimentation with roles.
Adolescents are aware of the necessity of making choices, experimenting with possibilities and testing capacities.
Synthesized choices form a template for adult decisions.
Identity becomes amplified and differentiated but can never be undone, with choices becoming part of individual history.
The identity-formation period is critical, the hatching period of the adult.

Gradual Process

Identity formation is the major task of adolescence but isn't readily observable, occurring gradually and often unintentionally.
It comprises inconspicuous and deliberate choices.
Choices like friends, reading material, activities, and drug use reflect and influence emerging identity.
Even young people themselves are unaware of the script.
During the Moratorium period, commitments may be experimental.

Erikson's Contribution

Erikson's concept of identity was a major contribution to psychological theory.
The term "identity crisis" became popular but diluted the subtlety of Erikson's work.
Erikson highlighted the influence of adolescence on future life through the identity process.
Erikson viewed identity formation as a convergence of epigenetic and social forces but didn't link it to psychodynamic adolescent growth.
His concept subsumes Blos's (1962) concept of consolidation, integration, and ego continuity and Kernberg's (1976) capacity for total object relations.

Blos and Separation-Individuation

Blos emphasizes separation-individuation as a precursor to identity formation.
Adolescent development achieves boundary sharpening and clarification of self-attributes distinct from others.
"Individuation implies that the growing person takes increasing responsibility for what he does and what he is rather than depositing this responsibility on the shoulders of those under whose influence and tutelage he has grown up" (p. 168).
Blos's concept of successful individuation resembles Erikson's concept of identity.

Linking Individuation and Identity

Understanding identity formation requires considering separation-individuation processes.
Individuation, autonomy, and identity formation are linked.
As aspects of the self are freed from primitive, narcissistic, and totalistic identifications, autonomous ego functions become available to identity formation.
One cannot understand individual identity without considering the psychic mass from which it precipitates.

Separation-Individuation: Mahler's Theory

Identity formation in adolescence expands on early efforts to cope with separateness and conflicts.
Experiences originate from inside the body and others from outside.
Mahler's theory traces the earliest emergence of the sense of identity.
Initially, there is no self; newborns experience pleasure and pain without a sense of "I."
By age three, children develop a firm sense of self-boundaries, knowing they are separate people with unique thoughts.

Phases of Separation-Individuation

Symbiotic Phase: Mother and infant are fused from the infant's point of view.
Differentiation Subphase: The baby has the first inklings of a separate self and other (object), starting to perceive separateness.
Practicing Subphase: Babies become intoxicated with increasing cognitive and motor abilities, exploring everything. Babies explore in optimal proximity to their mothers, needing their mothers near while proving that they do not need their mothers at all.
Rapprochement Subphase: Toddlers are aware of their separateness from the mother (around 18 months), attempting to integrate the need for closeness with the need for independence. The full impact of separateness comes upon toddlers during the rapprochement phase. Separation is not just the joyfulness and freedom that they thought it was; it also implies aloneness, helplessness, and overwhelming danger. Toddlers demand their mothers' investment in the autonomy experienced during the practicing phase. They wish to share the new experiences but also have an increased need for their mothers' love.

Rapprochement Challenges

The rapprochement subphase is critical and difficult for mothers and children.
Conflicting needs for autonomy and connection make children vulnerable to psychic distortions.
Mothers who re-experience symbiosis may discourage autonomy, while unavailable mothers may not meet renewed neediness.

Internalization

Spanning roughly 18 months to three years, encompasses the period when the most important internalizations occur.
The child begins to make what is external part of the self.
Introjection frees the child from excessive dependence on the parents. Soothing, comforting aspects of the mother, are now part of herself.
Children internalize parental demands to protect against possible transgressions.
These demands form the superego, an internal parent that prevents children from being "bad" and getting punished.
Identification helps defend the child against increased vulnerability, regaining omnipotence by becoming like the parents.

Outcome of Rapprochement

The outcome is the capacity to function separately, made possible by internalizing aspects of the object world.
Adequate development leads to a constant, positive image of the mother who can be envisioned even when not present.
With separation-individuation on its way to completion, the child develops a sense of individuality and a core of selfhood.

Latency Phase

The period between childhood and adolescence (ages six to twelve) reaps the benefits of conflict resolution.
The child is realistically and emotionally dependent on parents but has a separate sense of self.
The superego, primarily parental representations, harmonizes with actual parents.
Child and parents share a sense of good, bad, valued, and not valued.
Self-esteem derives from parental approval and skill growth, aided by parents.
Belief in parental omnipotence remains intact, with growth based on increasing identification with parental ego functions.

Adolescence and Separation

The harmony of the latency phase is shattered by the instinctual surge of puberty and the demands for further separation.
Adolescents want to move away from parents and stay near to feel safe.
Increasing autonomy involves adolescents more deeply in the extrafamilial world.
Peers and other admired people absorb emotional energy formerly reserved for parents.
Early theory conceptualized adolescence as detachment and replacement of parents.

Revision of Relationships

Mounting research evidence led to a revision, as adolescents do not abandon parents.
Separation-individuation requires a revision of relationships while preserving connection.
Many adolescents cannot individuate from internalized parents due to unmet expectations, remaining eternally dissatisfied.
Separation does not imply individuation, nor does physical separation.
Young people can become their own person without leaving home.
Critical rework aspects of the self during adolescence, gaining choice in creating a self that functions autonomously in relation to parents.

Rapprochement in Adolescence

A rapprochement process appears important.
New elements of self are tested in fantasy in the context of individuating from parents.
Example: A young woman imagines her parents' reaction to her first formal dress.
Adolescents rely on their capacities, with parents in the background.
As adolescents individuate, aspects liberated within the personality recombine into new ways of experiencing the self.
Separation-individuation does not abolish relationships but requires revision.
Development requires looking at the individuating, autonomous part and the connecting/relating self.

Identity and Connection

Identity is always bound to one's sense of connection to others.
It emerges from what is separated out but continues in connection.
Identity fuses the sense of who one was (with whom) and who one will be (with whom).
Identity formation may rest on modulation and selective acceptance of how one has always been.
Identity is intrapsychic and interpersonal.
Socialization theories have focused on social roles apart from personality development, while psychoanalytic theory has viewed personality development as wholly internal.
Keeping intrapsychic aspects and psychosocial demands in focus is challenging, converging most visibly in identity formation.
Identity emerges from a matrix of past selves, where the earliest sense of self crystallizes out of a merged, symbiotic attachment to mother.
With development, aspects tied to internalized parents become freed for new investments.
How these new investments are organized and reworked becomes the cornerstone of adult identity.

Intimacy vs. Isolation

According to Erikson, identity issues must be resolved before intimacy issues can be addressed.
One must decide who they are before attempting interconnection.
Erikson's writing is mainly about men.
Erikson suggests that much of a woman's identity resides in her choice of the men she wants to be sought by.

Intimacy and Identity in Women

Researchers concluded that intimacy seems to precede or at least be contemporaneous with identity among adolescent girls and young women.
There are debates about this formulation.
A major difficulty is that no one has looked seriously at how identity is organized in women.
Perhaps our psychological theory of development has been a theory of separation and autonomy rather than a theory of connection and relationship.
Perhaps a central aspect of identity is the commitment to a self-in-relation rather than to a self that stands alone.
Reconceptualized this way, the life stages for women are perhaps different from those for men.

Female Adolescents

We know little about female adolescents, as much of the theory of adolescence has been written to describe male phenomena.
Girls formulate identity more in connection to others and at less distance from their families than boys do.

Gilligan's Study on Moral Development

Concepts of autonomy, independence, and abstract achievement do not describe focal issues of growing up female.
Gilligan's (1982) study showed that women conceptualize and experience the world in a different voice, more person-centered and empathic.
Men and women operate with different internal models. The dominant fear is of being stranded, far out-on-the-edge and isolated from others.
Experiences like achievement and affiliation differ for men and women, even if behavioral manifestations look similar.

Women's Epistemological Sense

Women have unique, intuitive means of knowing that are silenced when value is placed only on logic and symbol.
Women's epistemological sense is rooted in connecting reality to an ongoing sense of self.
To know is to connect with rather than to master.

Chodorow's Argument

Chodorow (1978) argues that women, because they are mothered by someone of the same sex, form a different inner patterning of relationships that prevents them from ever becoming as separate as men.
Girls define themselves as continuous with others, while boys define themselves as more separate and distinct.
The basic feminine sense of self is connected to the world; the basic masculine sense of self is separate (p. 169).
Experimental evidence corroborates that female infants develop with less separateness from mothers.

May's Conclusions

May (1980) came to similar conclusions, looking at fantasy productions to understand organizing inner mythologies.
For men, the archetypal myth is the story of Phaethon (ambition, striving, and failure).
For women, the archetypal myth is the story of Demeter and Persephone (love, loss, and reunion).
Men organize themselves around achievement and failure (Pride), while women center on separation and connection (Caring).

Miller's Research

Miller and her research group have been positing the existence of a "relational self" in women.
"Development according to the male model overlooks the fact that women's development is proceeding but on another basis. … indeed, women's sense of self becomes very much organized round being able to make and then to maintain affiliations and relationships (Miller, 1976, p. 83).
These writers recognize the importance of relatedness to women and the necessity of constructs to describe its growth and vicissitudes.

Erikson's Perspective on Women

Erikson wrestled with this question in "Womanhood and Inner Space" (1968).
Erikson focuses on the uniquely feminine but not limiting female contributions to society.
His conclusions are much the same as Gilligan's (1982).
Erikson speaks of women keeping themselves open for the peculiarities of the man and the children.
Womanhood arrives when attractiveness and experience have succeeded in selecting what is to be admitted to the welcome of the inner space.

Models of Development and Women

Psychologists have struggled to shape a try to describe female development because of the absence of a comprehensive paradigm on which to built.
Classical psychoanalytic theory is grounded in the genital inferiority of women and deduces their moral inferiority as well.
Object-relations theory has seemed a promising avenue within psychoanalysis for grounding an understanding of women's development.
Basic conflicts are about the complexities of loving rather than sexual fulfillment, with self-definition and object relations linked.
Traditional male terms see development as a movement from dependence to autonomy, with relationships secondary to career goals.
Developmental psychologists and clinicians have commented on the inadequacy of existing developmental models to illuminate women's lives.
Neither a faced-stage model nor a timing-of-events model will adequately describe the complexity of women's life circumstances.
Longitudinal study on women is be able to phrase some meaningful questions.
This book is an effort to view identity in women in women's own terms, leaving open the possibility that both achievement and interpersonal aspects of life are important.