Development of Identity

The Psychology of Identity Development

Erik Erikson, a theorist who founded and popularized the psychological study of identity, originally spoke of identity as a central ego achievement to be reached in adolescence. Originally a child psychoanalyst, Erikson was trained by Sigmund Freud and adapted his psychosexual stage model of childhood into a broader model of human development, which incorporated the biology, psychology, and [Page 206]sociology of the developing person. Instead of Freud's focus on pathology and sexuality rooted in childhood, Erikson's eight-stage model of psychosocial development describes a positive ego task for each stage of life from infancy through old age. Incorporating an epigenetic assumption (the morphological study of how organs must sequentially develop in utero), Erikson argued that the epigenetic process continues after birth to meet certain biologically rooted tasks across the life span. Integrating cultural ethnography, Erikson argued that these developmental tasks can be culturally influenced and met in many different ways, but the primary sequence and general age of each stage task are quite consistent.

According to Erikson, after the fourth stage of industry versus inferiority (when societies often use education and play to teach the tools of that culture), puberty generally initiates the fifth stage—the desire to focus on ego identity. One's ego identity (ego comes from the Latin nominative pronoun I ) is formed from simpler identifications made in childhood and then integrated into a coherent sense of self in adolescence. Erikson theorized that through evolution, the adolescent is biologically wired to necessarily seek social resources for this identity process during this time of life. Illustrating the interdisciplinary quality of Erikson's psychosocial model, the psychological person is designed to pull identity content from the relative and always changing cultural resources. But how does Erikson define identity? Consistent definitions eluded Erikson, and his own ideas developed across his life span. Generally, identity is the negotiation of the self in relation to others. More specifically, identity is both an integration of a consciously expressed self (one that is presented and acknowledged by others) and a relatively unconscious pattern of consistent identity beliefs and behaviors.

With each of the eight stages, Erikson saw each ego task as a positive balancing of one aspect over (“versus”) another counterpoised aspect. In the fifth stage, identity versus role confusion, the person should form fairly consistent and satisfactory attachments to a sense of a unified self. Yet, this does not mean extreme unwavering identity commitments, as some level of identity fluidity (“role confusion”) is also helpful, but it should not be the predominant method of identity expression. In fact, Erikson argues that the ego identity is quickly challenged in the next developmental stage, intimacy versus isolation. As a component of long-term mating relationships, developing persons need to fuse and mingle their new identities with another person in early adulthood, at the same time as they maintain a coherent sense of self. Erikson later expressed frustration that scholars had turned his model into achievement measures, because such measures ignore the more complex idea of a balance of psychological patterns.

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