Part I - The story of whence identity and a step toward theory

Summary

“Identity” is both a cultural cliche and a technical term in the interpretive vocabularies of social and psychological analysts in the early 1980s. A mere forty years before, the term was hard to find. The story of the emergence of identity in the work of sociological social psychologists is briefly told in Chapter 1. In spite of the schematic nature of the chapter, we believe the main outlines are clear. Powerful and different sources came together in a unique configuration. The social and psychological turmoil of World War II provided a historical context in which what we may call the identity question was asked in three different situations.

First, a nation of immigrants asked what it meant to be an American, both during a war against the mother countries of many of its citizens and in the following period of prosperity amid anxiety, punctuated by emancipatory social movements. Second, an intellectually and geographically migrating scholar moved across the national boundaries of German-and English-speaking worlds and across the intellectual boundaries of psychoanalytic and social anthropological paradigms; as he struggled to make sense out of his biography and to understand the character malaise of contemporary persons, Erik Erikson began formulating the concept of ego identity and articulating the problem of identity as characteristic of the modern world. Finally, a small group of sociologists working within a version of American pragmatism were trying to develop a more adequate sociological psychology for understanding human action as essentially social; they knew of Erikson's work and quickly adopted his term, but shortened it to “identity.” Fueled by these three sources, identity was “in the air” by the 1960s and on everyone's tongue by the 1970s.