Spirit’).
A sense of crisis
Things can go wrong. Adolescents may fail to develop an integrated and well-
adapted identity, and confession, absolution, rationalization, even psychological
guidance may not resolve the ensuing problems. The unwelcome results include
identity conflict, role confusion, anxiety, fear of having no identity, and a loss of
self.
Enter Erik Erikson. It is safe to say that the Western obsession with identity
would not be what it is if it wasn’t for him. His work around the middle of the
20th century served as the psychological catalyst of it and today fulfils this
function more than ever. Erikson was a student of Sigmund Freud’s and like his
teacher a psychoanalyst and anthropologist of high repute. He invented (or
discovered?) the identity crisis. Both words, ‘invent’ and ‘discover’, do not quite
accurately describe what Erikson did and why he had such a strong influence on
psychology. Building on Freud’s theory that conceptualized individual
development as a synergy between internal drives and cultural demands, he gave
a name to a phenomenon that was in the air, striking a chord that people could,
indeed felt compelled to, respond to. If, as Freud had taught, personal identity
derives from calibrating the individual’s dependence on others with his or her
needs and desires, then it stands to reason that complicated relations with others
in early life can lead to an identity crisis.
Erikson developed this idea into a theory of ‘ego identity’ embedded in
psychosocial development. He used this term to stress the priority over external
social influences he gave to the ego. Yet his psychology of identity has a strong
social component, which is one of the reasons why his notion of identity crisis
spread so easily to other social sciences. What then is an identity crisis?
Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development distinguishes eight stages of
development from infancy to late adulthood, as summarized in Table 2.
Table 2. Erik Erikson’s stages of personality development.
Age Conflict Focus
≤ 1 Trust vs mistrust Developing trust