Identity crisis, according to psychologist Erik Erikson, is the failure to achieve ego identity during adolescence. Erikson coined the term.
The stage of psychosocial development in which identity crisis may occur is called the Identity Cohesion versus Role Confusion stage. During this stage (adolescence), we are faced with physical growth, sexual maturation, and integrating our ideas of ourselves and about what others think of us. We therefore form our self-image and endure the task of resolving the crisis of our basic ego identity. Successful resolution of the crisis depends on one’s progress through previous developmental stages, centering on issues such as trust, autonomy, and initiative.
Read more about Identity Crisis: Concept
Famous quotes containing the words identity and/or crisis:
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)