ABSTRACT
This chapter presents several examples who adopt very different roles in their lives, a phenomenon which has been called shifting. E. E. Jones and K. Shorter-Gooden have discussed the particular problems that black professional women face as a result of both sexism and racism in our society. To cope with this, black women engage in what Jones and Shorter-Gooden call shifting. Shifting can secure survival in the two worlds, but it can also be self-destructive. Engaging in war requires a radical break in development, which R. S. Laufer conceptualized as creating a subself to cope with the stress of war, and then trying to revert back to the former self after returning from the war. The former subself, which Laufer called the adaptive self, endeavors to integrate the person's identity across time, but has great difficulty doing this for the war subself.
