100 Years of Identity Crisis

Culture War Over Socialisation

Frank Furedi

• Éditeur: De Gruyter
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110708936
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sozialwissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Soziologie

The concept of Identity Crisis came into usage in the 1940s and it has continued to dominate the cultural zeitgeist ever since. In his exploration of the historical origins of this development, Frank Furedi argues that the principal driver of the 'crisis of identity' was and continues to be the conflict surrounding the socialisation of young people. In turn, the politicisation of this conflict provides a terrain on which the Culture Wars and the politicisation of identity can flourish. Through exploring the interaction between the problems of socialisation and identity, this study offers a unique account of the origins and rise of the Culture Wars.

Chapter 1: The Identity Labyrinth

‘Identity’ is more than a household term. Judging by the ceaseless stream of references to this word, transmitted through the mainstream and social media, identity has become the dominant cultural marker of our times. Yet, despite its constant usage, identity is not an attribute that anyone can take for granted. Individuals and groups self-consciously lecture people about how they want to be identified. Among the younger generations it has become fashionable to preface a statement with the words, ‘I identify as …’. That individuals feel obliged to broadcast their identity and to wear it on their sleeves is symptomatic of its tentative and ambiguous qualities. The statement ‘I identify as …’ invites validation but it also hints at the possibility of being misunderstood, misrecognised and even overlooked and rejected.

The statement ‘I identify as …’ conveys the impression that individuals get to decide their identity. And certainly, there is a veritable industry devoted to helping people customise their very own individual identity. Businesses promise to help find the ‘real you’ and provide you with an identity that will allow you to be different and stand out from the rest. Indeed, the imperative of differentiating individuals and groups is one of the main cultural drivers of the never-ending demand for identities. As one media company – appropriately named Identity − explains its mission: ‘In a world where sameness is on the rise, Identity wins by imprinting every project with a visual sophistication and refreshing individuality’.¹

Given the importance which individuals and society attach to identity, it is unsurprising that it has become a focus of anxiety and conflict. Indeed, the great emphasis that individuals confer on their identity intimates a sense of insecurity towards it. People who are confident about who they are and understand their place in the world do not feel the need to introduce themselves with the phrase ‘I identify as …’. Nor would they need to precede their comments on the media with phrases like ‘as a working-class woman’, or ‘as a man of colour’, or as a ‘gay author’, or as a ‘Cis white woman’.

Most people have not yet adopted the usage of the cliché, ‘I identify as …’. Nevertheless, disquiet and defensiveness pervade deliberations on this subject. People intuit that identities can be lost and, in the age of digital technology, easily stolen. Businesses have responded to this concern by marketing what they brand as ‘trusted identity’. One company sells a product called Augmented Identity, which it claims is an identity ‘that ensures privacy and trust and guarantees secure, authenticated and verifiable transactions’. The company claims that its product ‘allows us to truly enjoy life – because securing our identity is key to making our world a safer place’.²

Unfortunately, the experience of recent decades indicates that the goal of ‘securing our identity’ tends to elude most of us, most of the time. The problems associated with the project of ‘securing our identity’ are eloquently captured by the idiom of ‘identity crisis’. The term originates from the 1940s and is associated with the work of the psychologist Erik Erikson. Erikson observed that many American soldiers returning from the Second World War found that ‘their lives no longer hung together’ and they struggled to find their place in the world.³

Erikson’s concept of identity crisis drew attention to the challenge faced by young people as they attempted to cultivate a stable identity in order to develop ‘the capacity of the ego to sustain sameness and continuity’.⁴ His attempt to understand and explain what he saw as a difficult but normal developmental phase faced by young people provided important insights into some of the tensions faced by adolescents as they made their transition to adulthood. At the time ‘identity crisis’ was a rarely used clinical term that referred to a phase in the psychological development of adolescents.

In the 21^st century, usage of the term ‘the crisis of identity’ transcends the world of adolescents and has insinuated itself into everyday life. Erikson himself was surprised at the ease and the speed with which the concept of identity crisis was reconfigured to apply to a bewildering variety of situations.⁵ The phrase ‘identity crisis’ ceased to be focused on adolescents struggling to break free from their dependence on their parents and develop the psychological resources necessary for attaining adulthood. In 1965, the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliot Jaques invented the concept of the mid-life crisis. He noted that the crisis occurred around the age of 35 and in some cases lasted until a person reached 65 years of age.⁶ The last decade of the 20^th century saw the invention of a new age-related crisis, the ‘quarter-life crisis’: a condition of anxiety about the future, which afflicts people in their 20s.⁷

In 1968, Erikson reflected that during the previous 20 years, identity’s ‘popular usage has become so varied and its conceptual context so expanded that the time may seem to have come for a better and final delimitation of what identity is and what it is not’.⁸ However, instead of the meaning of this word being clarified and its usage confined to a limited range of circumstances, its application has continued to expand and expand.

When Erikson cautioned his public about the promiscuous use of identity in the 1960s, he pointed to what now seems like a relatively few examples. A few years later the term ‘identity crisis’ was used to describe the predicament faced by individuals of all ages, minorities, ethnic groups, women, and public and private institutions. Even America was said to face a crisis of identity. By the late 1970s, the very term ‘identity’ was almost always associated with a problem if not a crisis. The coupling of identity with crisis has continued to expand and is used to highlight the challenges faced by just about any institution, person, group or idea. To take some random examples featured on Google: ‘The Identity Crisis of Sustainable Development’,⁹ ‘The Identity Crisis of Feminist Theory’,¹⁰ ‘The Identity Crisis of the Ultra Rich’,¹¹ ‘The Online Identity Crisis’.¹²

Back in 1968, Erikson also drew attention to the emergence of a phenomenon that would become far more prominent in the decades to follow. He pointed to an unprecedented explosion of identity-talk by the 1960s counter-cultural movement as well as by other sections of society. ‘We are witnessing an exacerbated “identity-consciousness”’, he stated. He added:

For whereas twenty years ago we gingerly suggested that some young people might be suffering from a more or less unconscious identity conflict, a certain type tells us in no uncertain terms, and with the dramatic outer display of what we once considered to be inner secrets, that yes, indeed, they have an identity conflict – and they wear it on their sleeves.¹³

Erikson’s claim that the inner secrets surrounding people’s internal identity conflicts were transformed into public statements anticipated the emergence of a culture where many people do wear their identity on their sleeves. Suddenly people’s personal troubles were hurled into the public domain. The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his influential study, Stigma (1963), invented the phrase ‘politics of identity’. Goffman portrayed identity as a ‘public performance’.

But not even Erikson could have imagined the phenomenal ascendancy of what he characterised as identity consciousness. His reference to the wearing of identity on your sleeves was a metaphorical one. Today, people literally wear their identity on their sleeves. With so much at stake, many regard the identity they wear on their sleeves as a precious, private possession. The imperative of protecting the ownership of one’s identity has in recent years led to an explosion of outrage directed at people who supposedly appropriate the hairstyles, clothes, the food recipes or the tattoos associated with other people’s identity. These disputes about cultural appropriation often touch on petty details of what people look like.

With so much emotional, financial and political investment in identity it has inevitably become a site of conflict. Media commentators often draw attention to the heated rows that surround the politicisation of identity. However, disputes over identity are not confined to the political sphere; they play a prominent role in many spheres of public and private life. Take the case of Martina Navratilova, one of the greatest tennis players of recent times. She was vilified for arguing that it was not fair for trans-women to compete in women’s sports. In response to her comment, Navratilova was dropped as ambassador by the LGBT sports body, Athlete Ally for her views.

Navratilova had stated in a tweet that ‘You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women’. This statement was condemned by Rachel MacKinnon, a trans cyclist, who denounced Navratilova for trading ‘on age-old stereotypes and stigma against trans-women’.¹⁴ Sections of the media were at a loss to know who to support in this conflict: Navratilova, a well-known advocate of lesbian and gay rights, or MacKinnon, a vociferous proponent of trans rights. The question of who is and who is not a woman has turned into a highly polarised dispute between some feminists and lesbians on one side and trans activists on the other. Evidently the statement, ‘I identify as …’ does not always resolve the matter of how we want to be seen.

With so much attention focused on identity, it is easy to overlook the fact that it is rarely clear what is meant by this term. During the past 50 years numerous commentaries have underlined the elusive and imprecise usage of the word ‘identity’. A review of the concept in 1972 complained that Erikson’s use of identity ‘means something quite definite’ but it was ‘terribly elusive’. The reviewer wrote that the ‘subtlety of Eriksonian identity helps account for the vagueness that soon enveloped the term, for his ideas are of the sort that cannot bear being popularized without at the same time being blunted and muddied’.¹⁵ The psychiatrist Robert Coles noted in the 1970s that the terms identity and identity crisis had become ‘the purest of clichés’.¹⁶ ‘Identity is a rather bewildering concept, not least because it is associated with an incredible range of behaviour and human faculties’, wrote the sociologist Sarah Moore.¹⁷

The social psychologist, Roy Baumeister contends that despite the ceaseless references to identity, ‘we lack a clear idea of what identity actually is’.¹⁸ Numerous explorations of the meaning of identity allude to its multiple and often nebulous usage. One study of the concept of identity suggests that it is the very ambiguity of its meaning that permits its usage in a wide variety of situations.¹⁹ It seems evident that lack of precision about its use has not inhibited the growing importance of the term because it offers a cultural idiom or metaphor through which individuals and groups believe they can gain meaning about the human condition.

The ease with which the concepts of identity crisis and identity have been detached from their clinical settings points to a wider demand for a concept that can be used to illuminate the human predicament. Originally definitions of identity emphasised the sense of sameness and continuity felt by individuals towards themselves and their place in the world. Since the 1960s the term has been used as a synonym for ‘who you are’, ‘how you see yourself’ and ‘how others see you’. At the same time identity is frequently portrayed as something external to a person that must be found. The search for an identity often conveys a consumerist impulse of finding the right fit for yourself. So, too, does the idea of experimenting with identities. The concept of identity experimentation communicates the idea of choice. Identities that are the product of experimentation often refer to relatively superficial aspects of life such as hair colour, style of clothes, genre of music, or the ribbon or wristband you wear.²⁰

Since the 1970s numerous experts have drawn attention to the increasing demand for the concept of identity. John Marx, a sociologist, noted that in the mid-1970s there was a ‘precipitous upsurge in both public and scientific preoccupation with questions of identity’. He added that ‘“Identity crises” are held responsible for almost every conceivable kind of dissatisfaction and disagreement – ranging from generational and marital discord to foreign policy and international relations’.²¹ A decade later, in the mid-1980s, a group of sociologists pointed to the rapid growth in the everyday usage of the term ‘identity crisis’. They concluded that ‘we know of no other concept that emerged so rapidly and visibly both as a technical term and stock...

Table des matières

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Identity Labyrinth
• Chapter 2: Before Identity Crisis Was Given a Name
• Chapter 3: The Cultural Contradictions of Adulthood
• Chapter 4: Identity, Socialisation and Its Tenuous Link with the Past
• Chapter 5: Socialisation and Its Counter-Cultural Impulse
• Chapter 6: Quest for Moral Authority
• Chapter 7: Inventing Authoritarian Personalities
• Chapter 8: Towards a New Personhood
• Chapter 9: Cultural Turn to Identity
• Conclusion: Awareness as Its Own Cause
• Index