Psychoanalytic theorist Erik Erikson’s name is a bit redundant. Nevertheless, his theory on the social development of human beings remains relevant today. He also coined the phrase “identity crisis.”
Continuing on a theme I find interesting lately, “identity,” I’d like to quote from Erikson’s 1968 book, Identity, Youth, and Crisis.
We deal with a process “located” in the core of the individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture… In psychological terms, identity formation employs a process of simultaneous reflection and observation, a process taking place on all levels of mental functioning, by which the individual judges himself in the light of what he perceives to be the way in which others judge him in comparison to themselves and to a typology significant to them; while he judges their way of judging him in the light of how he perceives himself in comparison to them and to types that have become relevant to him. This process is, luckily, and necessarily, for the most part unconscious except where inner conditions and outer circumstances combine to aggravate a painful, or elated, “identity-consciousness.”
Identity, Youth, and Crisis, (p.22).
posted by stin splinters
