Concept
Ego identity
In Erikson's theory, the sense, consolidated in adolescence, of being the same person over time and of being recognised as such by others. It joins the identifications of childhood, one's own capacities and the roles a society offers into a coherent whole; Erikson held it to be an achievement of the ego's synthesising work rather than something given, and to remain open to revision across the life cycle.
Development
1946
introduced by Erik Erikson
Erikson first used the term ego identity in "Ego Development and Historical Change" (1946) and gave it its fullest early treatment in "The Problem of Ego Identity" (1956), both reprinted in Identity and the Life Cycle; Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968) is his summary statement.
In Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers (1959);Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968)
Relations
- 1946 introduced by Erik Erikson
Erikson first used the term ego identity in "Ego Development and Historical Change" (1946) and gave it its fullest early treatment in "The Problem of Ego Identity" (1956), both reprinted in Identity and the Life Cycle; Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968) is his summary statement.
- opposed by Identity diffusion
In Erikson's scheme identity diffusion is the negative pole of the adolescent crisis whose positive outcome is ego identity.
Works
- 1950
Erikson's first book brings clinical psychoanalysis together with cultural anthropology and history to argue that a child's development cannot be understood apart from the society that raises it: each culture meets the stages of the body and of the ego with its own methods of child training, and through them shapes the kind of adult it needs. The first part sets out the method through case histories, in which a symptom is read at once as a bodily event, an ego event and a social one, and restates Freud's theory of infantile sexuality as a scheme of zones and modes: each body zone carries a characteristic mode of approach (taking in, holding on, letting go, intruding, including) that becomes a modality of social life. The second part draws on Erikson's field work among the Sioux of South Dakota and the Yurok of northern California. It shows how the child training of a buffalo-hunting and of a salmon-fishing people fits their economies and their images of the world, and how the Sioux, cut off from their historical way of life, were left without an identity they could live by. The third part turns to the growth of the ego: the early ego failure of a schizophrenic child, children's play as a way of mastering experience, and the chapter "Eight Ages of Man", which extends the libidinal stages into a sequence of psychosocial crises across the whole life cycle, from basic trust versus mistrust in infancy to ego integrity versus despair in old age. The last part, "Youth and the Evolution of Identity", carries the notion of identity into history: the polarities of American identity, Hitler's imagery of his own childhood read as an appeal to the adolescent rebellion of German youth, and the Soviet film of Maxim Gorky's youth read as a document of an emerging Russian revolutionary identity. Revised and enlarged in 1963, the book brought the psychosocial stages and the identity crisis to a wide readership.
- 1959
Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers
The first monograph of the series Psychological Issues, gathering three of Erikson's papers with a historical introduction by David Rapaport. The papers are "Ego Development and Historical Change" (1946), in which Erikson first used the term ego identity; "Growth and Crises of the Healthy Personality"; and "The Problem of Ego Identity" (1956), his fullest early account of ego identity, of identity diffusion as the failure of identity formation in late adolescence, and of the psychosocial moratorium. Rapaport's introduction places Erikson's psychosocial theory within the psychoanalytic ego psychology founded by Heinz Hartmann and connects it with Hartmann's concern with adaptation.
- 1968
Erikson's fullest statement of his theory of identity. It follows the formation of identity across the life cycle, describes the identity crisis of adolescence and its pathological forms, and develops the notion of the psychosocial moratorium, the delay of adult commitment that society grants the young. In its prologue Erikson recalls that the term identity crisis was first used during the Second World War for veterans at the Mount Zion Veterans' Rehabilitation Clinic in San Francisco who had lost their sense of personal sameness and continuity. Later chapters carry identity into the questions of the 1960s: race, gender and the youth movements of the decade.
See also
People
References
- Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers1959Evidence for a relation
- Identity: Youth and Crisis1968Evidence for a relation
- Childhood and Society1950Evidence for a relation