ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with changes of identity through adulthood. Implicit in this framework is a critique of extant theories of personality development insofar as they oversimplify relationships between the person and his significant others. The complicated model of generational relations that then emerges suggests more than merely that theories of personality development operate with oversimplified models. The psychiatrists and clinical psychologists have paid special attention to the more pathological, and unconscious, forms of controlling interaction that result in minimizing personality change. In Erikson's terminology there is a difference between "a conscious sense of individual identity" and "an unconscious striving for a continuity of personal character," or between the former and "the silent doings of ego-synthesis." The subjective feeling of continuity turns not merely upon the number or degree of behavioral changes, but upon the framework of terms within which otherwise discordant events can be reconciled and related.
