ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that identity is composed of an unconscious core, established in childhood, and a manifest identity determined by the influence of environmental circumstance and current psychic mental disposition. It considers first the determinants of this unconscious core and then the determinants of the manifest expression of the individual components of this core. Manifest identity is profoundly influenced by the personality consolidation of adolescence, and also by current cultural and political pressures. Close study of identity—and this is as true of its Jewish components as it is of others—reveals that over the course of the life cycle, manifest identity changes. There are two types of change: There is the change that occurs gradually, as an aspect of the process of passing through the life cycle, from birth to death. There is the change that occurs more abruptly from time to time as one's mental state responds to stress or its removal, especially when the response involves lapse into illness.
