The identity crisis turn

 

It was, I believe, the existential psychoanalyst Erik Erickson who first coined the phrase “identity crisis”. In “Young Man Luther”  - a truly Hollywoodish title for a monograph. Erickson defined the term with relation to adolescence  which he naturalized as part of the life cycles that he saw as inherent to the full development of human beings:

“I have called the major crisis of adolescence the identity crisis; it occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, ut of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood...”

Erickson, in the late fifties, became a celebrated figure, one of those intellectuals that Time Magazine would reference. Perhaps the height of his popular fame came in the early 70s. On April 5, 1970, he made the cover of NYT magazine under the headline: Beyond Freud, which was glory indeed at the height of Freudian psychoanalysis. Tom Wolfe, that labeller, called the 70s the me decade, but it could have been better labelled the “identity crisis” decade. This interests me, since identity has grown in importance since the 70s, while “identity crisis” has lost its psychological roots. There is a certain pleasing backwardness to the idea that the era of identity comes after the era of the identity crisis – or is this, in fact, the kind of growth through life passages Erikson envisioned?

The Erikson article in the NYT begins with an anecdote: the writer, a professor of psychology, is attending a faculty function. A “young mother” there was “talking about her identity crisis”, which came about because she and her husband had decided to have no more children. “It was as if ... she had been robbed of some part of herself and now needed to find a new function to replace the old one.”

Of course, being a young mother, the male professor had to show her, for the reader’s benefit, who was who: “When I remarked that her story sounded like a case history from a book by Erik Erikson, she replied, “who’s Erikson?”

One can imagine her side of this story.  And in fact, one can more than imagine – although the professor didn’t know it, the seventies belonged to the young mother, and to the explosion of the woman’s “new function.”

The same NYT magazine contained two other articles – one a consideration of the Chicago Seven and the New Haven Black Panther trials, the other a consideration of white unemployment.  A crossroads, this particular issue, of the spirits of the time.

That 1970 article crowned the march of the “identity crisis” out of Erikson’s books and into the general public. In 1963, Diane Ravich, reviewing Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, diagnosed it as saying that the American housewife is undergoing an identity crisis – which she called “a much overworked phrase.” Perhaps this was because the disorienting social forces unleashed during the Cold War had recognized, in a phrase that had its origins in colonial outposts, a mantra. As the NYT reported, Erikson’s theory of life passages came out of his work on two Indian reservations in the 30s and 40s.

“Erikson did field work not only with the Oglala Sioux of Pine Ridge, S.D. ... but also with the salmon-fishing Yurok of North California.”

Erikson was one of a group of workers in the human sciences, like his friends Margaret Mead and Alfred Kroeber, who were engaged in a process of cultural transference, looking for solutions to “Western problems” while at the same time projecting onto their “subjects” Western theories. Theories that, one should remember, came out of European or American metropoles that had fairly recently been surrounded by a majority peasant population, whether of Central European peasants – Erikson came from Vienna – or American smallholder farmers.

It was a context of cultures in the midst of liquidation, both physical – from genocide – and cultural.

“Central to many an adult Indian’s emotional problems seemed to be his sense of uprootedness and lack of continuity between his present life-style and that portrayed in tribal history. Not only did the Indian sense a break with the past, but he could not identify with a future requiring assimilation of the white culture’s values.”

As it turned out, the “white culture’s values” were, at the same time, de-routing and disorienting the white subject, l’homme moyen sensuel. As well, the black subject. The female subject. Subjects all over in labs all over, subjects all over  in cities and suburbs, factories and faculties, who responded well to the conditioning, the advertising, the credit cards, the local organizations of uplift, etc.

The identity crisis as a phrase has now embedded itself in the “discourse”, although, oddly, there is still no reckoning between the universalist claims of life passages, out of which the identity crisis comes, and the identity turn. That the identity crisis became portable – that it hits now the Democratic party, now the society for better dentistry, etc. – has made it blander, and less startling in its reference to uprootedness, alienation, and cultural annihilation. If there is a missile in the first act, it should go off in the last act – according to an old theatrical theory. But we are long beyond the last act, and the destruction we face was not the one we envisioned when we moved out of the cities to live and built the highways to carry us away from the bomb’s epicenter. And we all now identify, but who is this “we”, and how does it move through its life?