Identities: Never the same again?

This book offers a different look at Identity and identification and introduces the notion of substitute identities (and a subsequent repertoire of personalities) as a rather common phenomenon in many people, as the root of PTSD and other identity conflict and dissociation disorders and the key to effective diagnosis and treatment. Identity is a “hot topic" in academia and popular culture. It might be considered as the ideological signifier of our age, but also carries an ever increasing weight as a political emblem, even as this mostly concerns identification, which we easily trade for consciousness. Identity is an essential attribute of being. At a personal level, identity is not only what we think we are or the labels we are given. It includes our unconscious and is more than our personality, the expression of our identity in relation to others. It goes deeper than our subjective selfhood, the notion of me or self which provides the sense of sameness and continuity, but this stability is an illusion. We are not the same all the time, the continuity of a single ‘self’ is a chimera. This is thus also true for our personality, One of the central themes of this book is that our personal identity is not an indivisible, immutable, totally consistent given, but rather a dynamic matrix, often a repertoire of identities. This is not a pathological condition, but something many of us have, with resulting inner conficts, which eventually may cause depression or disease. To help understand these identity conflicts, in oneself and in others, we present a new way to look at the formation and development of the primary identity and substitute identities and how these manifest and change. Dissociation and identification are processes of transformation, they shape us, in a continuous process. Issues like the group mind, social identity, the Western identity crisis, identity politics, radicalization and identification mechanisms are covered in this book, as are PTSD and auto-immune diseases. We show how there is resonance between cell-, organ- and personal-identity at the epigenetic level. This book is full of new and daring insights and visualizations on how our psyche operates and how we as humans function.

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ, 2017

Concepts of identity, identity formation, identity politics, and collective identity, despite being vague, are among the most used notions in social theory, historical analysis, and everyday life and politics. In the last four or five decades "identity" has become a catchword that could explain almost any political or cultural development. In this paper, I discuss existential and social dimensions of identity and identity formation, decode the relational and historical conditions of their construction and argue that identities at any given point of time represent a general (albeit multiple) and fragmented expression of human's capacity. I further contend that identity is a social relation: an embodiment of power structures and power discourses. I end up with some reflections on how we can imagine communities compatible with human emancipation by replacing the particularity of identity with the universalism of humanity and focusing on humanity and discourses of human emancipation. This paper reconstructs the "identity debate" as a part of a conceptual deliberation of the narrative of historical change.

British Journal of Sociology, 2002

The concept of 'identity' is central to much contemporary sociology, re ecting a crisis that manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, there is a view that identity is both vital and problematic in this period of high modernity. Secondly, while this awareness is re ected in sociology, its accounts of identity are inconsistent, under-theorized and incapable of bearing the analytical load required. As a result, there is an inherent contradiction between a valuing of identity as so fundamental as to be crucial to personal well-being, and a theorization of 'identity' that sees it as something constructed, uid, multiple, impermanent and fragmentary. The contemporary crisis of identity thus expresses itself as both a crisis of society, and a crisis of theory. This paper explores the diverse ways in which 'identity' is deployed before turning to case-studies of its use by Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells. This strategy demonstrates the widespread and diverse concern with identity before exploring how problematic it has become, even in the work of two of the world's leading sociologists.

2016

Identity is derived from the Latin “idem”, which means “being the same [person]”. Researchers approach this “powerful construct” (Vignoles et al., 2011, p. 2) in different ways: identity is variously understood as a (cognitive) self-image, as something shaped by habit, as a social attribution or role, as a habitus, a performance, or a constructed narrative (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1991, p. 194 ff.). Identity is a constant object of academic discourses, which can be interpreted partly as a reaction to the radical changes that have taken place in modern times, and the crises that have often accompanied them. For example, George Herbert Mead’s theory on identity development emerged at the beginning of the last century in Chicago, against the background of a constantly growing number of migrants, who “threatened” the self-concept of the local residents. This led to a renegotiation of affiliation and difference, and a redrawing of the boundary between people’s own identity and that which ...

2009

On the opening page of this inquiry into identity Bernd Simon reminds us that "Identity is fashionable. Everybody wants to have one, many promise to provide one". Identity is not only highly topical in popular culture but is the subject of considerable academic musing and social scientific endeavour.

Theory and Society, 2000

The worst thing one can do with words,'' wrote George Orwell a half a century ago, ``is to surrender to them.'' If language is to be ``an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought,'' he continued, one must ``let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.'' 1 The argument of this article is that the social sciences and humanities have surrendered to the word ``identity''; that this has both intellectual and political costs; and that we can do better. ``Identity,'' we argue, tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity). We take stock of the conceptual and theoretical work ``identity'' is supposed to do and suggest that this work might be done better by other terms, less ambiguous, and unencumbered by the reifying connotations of ``identity.'' We argue that the prevailing constructivist stance on identity ^the attempt to ``soften'' the term, to acquit it of the charge of ``essentialism'' by stipulating that identities are constructed, £uid, and multiple leaves us without a rationale for talking about ``identities'' at all and ill-equipped to examine the ``hard'' dynamics and essentialist claims of contemporary identity politics. ``Soft'' constructivism allows putative ``identities'' to proliferate. But as they proliferate, the term loses its analytical purchase. If identity is everywhere, it is nowhere. If it is £uid, how can we understand the ways in which self-understandings may harden, congeal, and crystallize? If it is constructed, how can we understand the sometimes coercive force of external identi¢cations? If it is multiple, how do we understand the terrible singularity that is often striven for ^and sometimes realized ^by politicians seeking to transform mere categories into unitary and exclusive groups? How can we understand the power and pathos of identity politics?

Trying to describe identities, both national and individual, appears to be a naïve task, being more plausible the notion of heterogeneous cultural space instead of national identity, and the notion of individual imaginary instead of individual identity, understood as a flexible posture that is built through identification with diverse languages and lifestyles, as we build our history, heritage, and our processes of cultural transference. Both heterogeneous cultural space and individual imaginary are constructed not only from the immediate influences provided by the media, but also through the way we articulate the local and our relationship with the rest of the world. There is a dissociation between the public and private versions of identity, but it does not mean they constitute completely independent worlds. Public versions of identity are constructed by selecting characteristics from ordinary people’s ways of life, which inevitably influence the way we perceive ourselves. Because it is not an automatic or mechanical process, there are groups that do not feel represented by the dominant versions, without sharing that sense of identity. Therefore, public versions of identity are somewhat exclusive. This conflict generates critical readings, in which individuals, in the construction of their individual identity, reject, criticize, or actively reinterpret dominant discourses. Within this context, globalization has made the process of identity construction more complex. The simultaneity of information, so vast and accessible, hinders the individual’s ability to understand what is happening. It is difficult to form a unitary image of oneself, both individually and collectively.

2006

Forum University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture the Arts, 2010

Introduction: special issue of FORUM on Identity Denise deCaires Narain "Identity" is a word that we have learned-with good reason-to be wary of. Its suggestion of solidity and fixity makes it a dangerous and divisive concept that elides the flux and instability that characterizes selfhood. In academic discourses, identity has been theorized exhaustively and the idea of the subject as de-centred and constantly shifting is taken-for-granted. But still "identity" won"t go away. Indeed, in some arenas of public culture, "identity" remains a necessary concept around which to consolidate ideas of selfhood that may not be so readily accommodated in prevailing definitions of the self.