ABSTRACT
Identity is not a recent invention, like the Internet, that everyone suddenly began to want. People have always had identities. The modern difficulty with identity must be understood as resulting from a change in identity, or rather in the way identity is constructed, developed and created, or deconstructed again. Of course, names and addresses are labels that provide some help to define a person’s identity. But they provide only a partial definition. An identity crisis is not resolved by checking one’s wallet for one’s name and address. People who have problems with identity are generally struggling with some more difficult aspects of defining their own identity, such as the establishing of both some integrity across various situational contexts and a kind of long-term continuity in their I-world relationships. Within culturally structured constraints, developing individuals select and construct their own developmental ecology and thus create and shape their personal culture. In times where globalization, rationalization, rapid societal change, migration, and multiculturalism are growing, the increasing hunger for identity is remarkable, although the desire for identity is different from some of the other modern appetites because identity implies being attached both inwardly and outwardly. Without these attachments, uprootedness results. Already in the late 1960s, Erik Erikson (1968) assumed that uprootedness might be an explanation for the popularity of the concept of identity in the late twentieth century. However, contemporary efforts to define and study identity vary considerably in their scope and in how they address these issues (cf. Kroger 2000). Today, theoretical and philosophical discussions of the self also abound outside the sociocultural tradition such as in cognitive science approaches (cf. Gallagher 2000). Rather than focusing on identity development in terms of the emergence of the self as a meaning maker (Kegan 1982) or on the social construction of meaning, with its emphasis on the self in cultural context (Shweder et al. 1998). The present book adopts a more pragmatic view on the formation of identity or the self.
