As i was reading Erikson, some of the sentences were interesting...
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Identity is "central control over oneself, for which only the inner agency of the ego could be held responsible."
Some of the concepts that are used to indicate identity are wrong such as self-conception, self-imagery, self-etseem, role ambiguity, role conflict, and role ross.
Identity is "never established as an ahcevement in the form of a personality armor, or of anything static and unchangeable."
So WHAT IS IDENTITY?
As Jennifer wrote below, reading Erikson is quite boring which I think is due to his indirect way of explaining things. He never really defines or directlly states what he is trying to say! (seems to me...)
So I went on to the early developmental stages, which I thought was his version of explaining Freud's psychosexual development using the oral, anal, and phallic stages. I thought that he was adding some social terms and relatoinship attributes to Freud's theory.
It was when he said that the sense of initiative is important in childhood, and that the great governor of initiative is conscious, the "inner voice" that when I thought this was interesting. However, again, what is "initiative" and "who intiaties"? What is inner voice?
I was thinking that he might be emphasizing the role of Ego in balancing between the id and the superego. He elaborates how a baby makes contact to the mother in each stages, and how the baby increasingly moves away from the mother as he/she grows up.
I'm quite confused of what he wants to indicate by identity (partly because my understanding of identity was through those concepts that he categorized as wrong ones to indicate identity.), and how this is different from or the same as Ego in Freud's theory.
Yes this is the trouble of following Freud who is one of the great writers of history and was twice nominated for the Nobel prize in literature. But I think his ideas on identity are so important, because really he is the first to develop the construct and then so many people misinterpret. We will talk about this more tomorrow but identity is basically taking on an ideology, a way of looking at and understanding the world. It is a crisis between the self as civilized and the self as part of the compact majority. Which ideology do we choose and why?
ReplyDeleteI had the same question with Rachel. I could understand that a crisis has an important role to form identity. However, the concept of 'identity' is still abstract for me even after reading. I thought that identity indicates the process how and what I think about myself but it seemed to have more complicate meanings. Anyways, I liked this concept because it seemed to interact with environment (how people accept their environment and how they change themselves by environment).
ReplyDeleteThe idea of identity is also still very fluid for me - but just to bounce off your idea of how it interacts with the environment. I really enjoyed how Erikson discusses the way people influence their environments, especially his discussion of babies as "powerful" in this respect.
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