ABSTRACT
I begin my chapter with a sketch of the evolution of my thinking about the concept of identity. It was in the early 1960s that I realized that the work on the concept of self (to which I had been a contributor [Sarbin, 1952]) seemed to have reached a dead end. Although many psychologists had accepted the idea of the social origins of selfhood, they were reluctant to give up their attachment to Cartesian mentalism. Rolf Kroger, Karl Scheibe, and I (1965) tried to make a fresh start by latching onto the concept of social identity. We prepared a working paper that featured a three-dimensional model of the transvaluation of social identity. Scheibe and I continued to develop the model and some years later published it as the centerpiece in a book that we edited under the title Studies in Social Identity (Sarbin & Scheibe, 1983). The titles of a few of the contributions suggest the direction of the work: The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society; Loneliness and Social Identity; The Psychology of National Identity; Rebels and Sambos: The Search for the Negro’s Personality in Slavery; The Self-Narrative in the Enactment of Roles; and A Metaphor for the Identity of Tragic Heroes. The contributors were not all psychologists, one was a specialist in Shakespeare, another a historian, another an anthropologist, still another an authority on Talmudic studies.
