ABSTRACT
David Riesman (1909–2002) was educated at Harvard College, then Harvard Law School, after which he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Education, leisure, services, these go together with an increased consumption of words and images from the new mass media of communications. With the establishment of a good initial relationship to the world of skills and tools, and with the advent of puberty, childhood proper comes to an end. Youth begins. The danger of this stage is role confusion. Where this is based on a strong previous doubt as to one's sexual identity, delinquent and outright psychotic episodes are not uncommon. It is a commonplace to state that whatever one may come to consider a truly American trait can be shown to have its equally characteristic opposite. The process of American identity formation seems to support an individual's ego identity as long as he can preserve a certain element of deliberate tentativeness of autonomous choice.
