What is an identity? Is it the person we appear to be? If so, in which situation, for as all will be aware we can be different people at different times and in differing situations. You are not the same with your spouse as you are with your mum, with your pals, with your boss. You are not the same at sixteen years old leaving school as you are at seventy six. Known psychologies such as the biases of nostalgia and cognition as well as the influence of social conformity, cultural norms and religious heritage play huge roles in the everyday practice of life for some individuals and very little for others. Repressed emotions and conflicts highlighted by the work of psychoanalysts show that there are forces which we may be unaware of that shape identity, and opinion is still divided after two thousand five hundred years of western philosophy as to the true nature of man.
Born somewhere, into some culture and in some part of history, conditions that play a large role in the basis of identity regardless of subsequent changes thrust upon it in the processes of growing and living. Existentialist Jean Paul Sartre believed that existence preceded essence meaning that man was born as a virtual blank slate (Sartre, 1946), cognitive scientist Steven Pinker states that science provides us with the materials to grow and develop the self but the self is already partially formed and predisposed from genetic material inherited before birth (Pinker, 2002), Sam Harris theorises that identity is inseparable from belief and that regardless of how you are forced to live by society true nature is revealed through empowerment of belief (Harris, 2006), Friedrich Nietzsche felt that religion bound people into acting in ways that were unnatural and that the religious acted as they do based on the promise of happiness or fear of punishment (Nietzsche, 2003) and philosopher Martin Heidegger opined that an individual may be known by knowing first what they fundamentally care about and thus what they construct as a result of this care (Heidegger, cited in Roderick, 1993) .
So this claim is not a simple one, I will attempt in this essay to explain this statement further..
The factors of identity
What contributes to identity in the ongoing practices of life is the situations the self finds itself in, it would be naïve to think that each self is formed with the same, or an equal, balance of experiential biases. It is not the same process for a Somalian female Muslim child, an Israeli Jewish boy and the North American son of a Texas oil tycoon to form their future selves, as the factors which will influence them in their formative years are so radically different.
The research, the method and the individuals
Erik Erikson points out that identity changes with time and the influences of experience and situation cause conflicts (Hollway, 2009). These conflicts are in his view a necessary evolution of the identity to meet a changing landscape of needs as a person’s circumstances alter. An example of this would be stages of dependent status throughout a lifetime, from varying degrees of dependency in childhood to being depended upon as an adult and possibly to being a dependent again in old age. These are circumstances, like many in life, which are not chosen, but must never-the-less be dealt with as each of these statuses influences the self’s view of itself and others perceptions of it also.
Identification with others is indicated to be when a person can know what it is like to be in the same situation as another and to know the forces of that situation, but this view is narrow as an explanation of identification in that it is possible to empathise and desire the same circumstance without direct association with the experience of the individual in question, it is pointed out in the material that Liyanna explains that she has a greater understanding of how her mother felt in an older photograph when she herself has become a mother, but on a later page we encounter Silma who has also become a mother. Silma’s want to be a mother was by her own admission a strongly felt and always known desire; she had already simulated both the experience and the empathy in order to form her opinion that it is what she desired for herself. Regardless that her cultural background may also influence a force of expectation toward marriage and then motherhood in young adulthood it is important to note that she states that her desire to be a mother has always been with her. The changes that she then makes as far as social practices and attire are a reaction to circumstances of dependency and expectations. She no longer is a self that can afford to focus on itself and the easy way to cope with this change is to rationalise that her former identity is disconnected and now less appealing to her than who she has become, she is encouraged in this rationalisation by those in her circle of familiarity who have already made the same transition themselves. In this way she becomes the self that she is forced into becoming by a process of necessity due to changing circumstance, familial acceptance and pressure of cultural expectation. Through the process of introjection she has readied herself for this experience but still it brings with it conflicts that she may not have envisaged such as the changing relationship with a sibling who feels that they have lost out, her sister is now disconnected from her and her own sense of identity may be shaken by the changes Silma has made.
It may be too simple in the case of a person who is part of a minority group in Britain and who is subject to the forces of both their own cultural maintenance and the intrusion upon that task of laws or common practices of the land they reside in to not be conflicted. In the case of Anthony, a black youth who exhibits first a break from then a reaction to perceived racial stereotypes as well as bolstering those same stereotypes in the conversation it can be seen that the expectation on the part of the other players in any given interaction is as important a factor in determining the actions of the self as is the motivation of the self to be its true self.
Anthony’s action of acting white likely is a manifestation of his feelings of persecution and alienation as a young black man in predominantly white Britain, (It may also be that these reactions to prejudices are a social inheritance and not borne of his own personal experience). The social scientist interacting with Anthony in the simulation of a phone interview is in this case the minority race present; this may be the motivating factor to Anthony’s quick change of attitude into what is for him a more comfortable outward reflection of his identity and one that identifies him with the members of his family that are also present. He is possibly being sarcastic and acting more in line with ethnic expectation than he normally would be if the white researcher was not part of this situation, her presence in the room changes his identity. As a method of research this introduces the flaw of the experimenter overly influencing the experiment, even though this is taken into account through research reflexivity it has an impact on the objectivity of the study that would not be a factor otherwise. While it was important for the simulation that the phone call be made between a white employer and a black youth, it may have been preferable to have made an actual call to a white employer and had a researcher present who was a member of the same ethnic group as the youth, possibly then a more authentic identity may have been discovered.
Conclusion
In the introduction I mentioned that each person is born into an identity defining set of circumstances which mean that the project of honing themselves as an individual is not from scratch any more than the project of writing a song would begin without a spoken language. I think that each of the scenarios in the text of chapter 6 (Hollway, 2009) highlight this point, in each an individual is in transition from one set of circumstances to another and may be struggling with the conflicts brought by this change, in each the individual brings with them both the baggage of their cultural background and the expectations of their close social relationships. The research also highlights the impact of identity not only to the individual who is changing but to those around them; this is an important point to note as it shows the forces of change even when viewed as positive can cause unforeseen conflicts.
Paul Simon Wilson
Sartre J P, (1946). Existentialism and Humanism. 1st ed. Paris: Editions Nagel.
Pinker S, (2002). The Blank Slate. 1st ed. London: Penguin.
Harris S, (2006). The End of Faith. Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. 1st ed. London: Simon & Schuster Ltd.
Nietzsche F, (2003). The Genealogy of Morals. New York: Dover Publications.
Roderick R (1993). The Self Under Siege (1993) Lecture 2: Heidegger and the Rejection of Humanism. [ONLINE] Available at: http://rickroderick.org/302-heidegger-and-the-rejection-of-humanism-1993/
Hollway W, (2009).Chapter 6: Identity Change and Identification. In Bromley. S, Clarke. J, Hinchliffe. S, Taylor.S, (ed). Exploring Social Lives. 1st ed. 2009: Milton Keynes: The Open University
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