ABSTRACT
THE COHERENT sense of self, of one’s total character or personality, is identity: what a person has been, what he is, and what he wants for himself. He is all of these things at all times in his life; and he is these things because the developmental period in his life coincided with certain points in our social and economic history. Today’s adult who was a hungry child in the Oklahoma dust bowl during the Great Depression still carries with him memories of which he may be totally unaware: parental anguish as his parents sought to obtain food for survival, rootlessness as they moved across a suspicious “belt-tightened” nation angered by the drought and economic disaster that combined to spread distress. Such an adult may not know why he becomes frightened and anxious when he is hungry although he has plenty of money. But he may recall with bitterness 240the necessity to work in the fields beside his entire family so that together they might earn enough to eat, yet not enough so that he could go to school “like others” and prepare for a life of work that might have given him more than a weak toehold in a changing labor market with less and less need for men like him.
