ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an analysis of 71 letters written over a period of 9 years by a young Latin-American woman. The letters provide firsthand information about the internal processes of the young woman as she dealt with traumatic losses from age 13. The analysis of the letters focuses on this young woman's psychological development as she struggled to integrate the traumatic loss of her parents and country and to adjust to the demands of adolescence and early adulthood. The chapter provides a test of the applicability of one of the established theories of adolescent development—that of Erik Erikson—to the understanding of the identity development of an adolescent growing up under traumatic political/historical conditions. Erikson's stages of psychological development is based on the coding system which provides a means of coding self-references but also allows for coding the writer's view of the identity intimacy and generativity concerns of another person.
