ABSTRACT
In her book, Ethnic Options, Mary Waters (1990) documents evidence of shifting identities in immigrant families, adaptations that continue for generations as descendants of other nations embrace and resist an “American” identity while creatively integrating distinctive language, symbols, and ways of being into everyday life. Recently, while visiting relatives in Italy, I was acutely aware of the way ethnic identities are created within a social context. I had always had a sense of myself as Italian-American – the Italian part decidedly first. The older I get, the more I am aware of the nuanced and deep influences of my working-class childhood and my southern Italian, dialect-speaking, peasant ancestry. While in Italy, I went to get my Italian citizenship card in my grandfather’s village. Ironically, it was on this visit, rejoicing in my long sought-after dual citizenship and speaking Italian every day, that I had a surprising shift: I have no idea of what it means to be “Italian.” Cultural identity is socially influenced, nuanced, and unstable, even more so when, out of need or curiosity, we let ourselves consider the multiplicity of our identities, rejecting some aspects of cultural ideals that we previously embraced. Psychoanalysis is, in part, an iterative process of undermining the cultural ideals with which we identify.
