Concept
Identity diffusion
The lack of an integrated, stable sense of oneself and of the important people in one's life. Erik Erikson used the term for a failure of identity formation at the crisis of adolescence; Otto Kernberg made it a lasting structural sign of borderline personality organization, in which contradictory images of self and others stay split apart instead of being joined into a whole.
Development
1967
reworked by Otto F. Kernberg
Kernberg took Erikson's notion of identity diffusion, which Erikson tied to the identity crisis of adolescence, and made it a defining structural feature of borderline organization, extending it from the concept of oneself to the concept of one's significant others.
In Borderline Personality Organization (1967)
Undated
introduced by Erik Erikson
Erikson described identity diffusion as the failure of identity formation in late adolescence, chiefly in "The Problem of Ego Identity" (1956), reprinted in Identity and the Life Cycle; he later preferred the term identity confusion.
In Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers (1959);Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968)
Relations
- 1967 reworked by Otto F. Kernberg
Kernberg took Erikson's notion of identity diffusion, which Erikson tied to the identity crisis of adolescence, and made it a defining structural feature of borderline organization, extending it from the concept of oneself to the concept of one's significant others.
- gave rise to Borderline personality organization
Kernberg built borderline personality organization on Erikson's identity diffusion, which he made the first of its three defining structural features.
- introduced by Erik Erikson
Erikson described identity diffusion as the failure of identity formation in late adolescence, chiefly in "The Problem of Ego Identity" (1956), reprinted in Identity and the Life Cycle; he later preferred the term identity confusion.
- opposes Ego identity
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.
- 1967
Borderline Personality Organization
In this paper Otto Kernberg argues that the patients loosely called "borderline" do not occupy an unstable zone between neurosis and psychosis but share a specific and remarkably stable pathological organization of the personality, which he names borderline personality organization. He examines it from three angles. Descriptively, he lists symptoms that should raise the suspicion of it: chronic diffuse anxiety, polysymptomatic neuroses, polymorphous perverse sexual trends, prepsychotic (paranoid, schizoid, hypomanic) personalities, impulse neuroses and addictions, and lower-level character disorders such as the infantile, narcissistic, "as if" and antisocial personalities. He insists, however, that no symptom is decisive. The diagnosis is made structurally, from nonspecific ego weakness, a shift toward primary-process thinking seen mainly in unstructured psychological testing, a characteristic constellation of primitive defenses centred on splitting, and a pathology of internalized object relations in which good and bad images of the self and of others remain unintegrated, while reality testing is largely preserved. Genetically and dynamically, he traces the organization to an excess of pregenital, especially oral, aggression, constitutional or the result of early frustration, which drives a premature and distorted oedipal development. By joining Melanie Klein's ideas on splitting and projective identification to Edith Jacobson's ego psychology of self and object representations, the paper became the founding statement of Kernberg's structural approach to borderline and narcissistic pathology and the ground of his later work on its treatment.
- 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
Linked from
People
References
- Borderline Personality Organization1967Evidence for a relation
- Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers1959Evidence for a relation
- Identity: Youth and Crisis1968Evidence for a relation
- Childhood and Society1950Evidence for a relation