Identity and Identity development

This is a long text that synthesizes many insights from the domain of identity development.

What is the focus of student-age personal development?

College students are mostly between 18 and 22 years old and they are developing from adolescents into young adults.

Adolescence is among the most confusing periods in the lifespan, largely because it is when we start to doubt whatever our parents taught us while we struggle with finding something new to hold onto and guide us through life. In other words, a process known as identity formation starts in adolescence. {Klimstra:2017ge}

Identity formation refers to constructing a self-identity. This is a sense of

• Am I an adequate actor in the world?
• What do I stand for and what do I take for true?
• What do I find valuable and worth striving for in life?
• What role in the world do I aspire?
• What are the boundaries of my moral code?
• To what degree do I need external authorities and am I the authority of my life?
• Do I let my beliefs comply with social consensus or ideology or do I self-decide on what to believe and what not?

The answers to these questions are rarely formulated with any precision. Instead they are acted out in response to life’s challenges. These enacted answers form a basis of meaning-giving, but they also constitute the way one is perceived by others ¹.

A well-developed self-identity separates a mature and responsible adult from a dependent (and not fully responsible) child. A self-identity provides the necessary and solid basis for autonomous self-guided behaviors and responsibility-taking that lasts throughout life. According to Berzonsky:

“Identity formation is one of the major developmental challenges that adolescents and young adults must negotiate. To effectively regulate and govern their lives, individuals need to develop a stable and meaningful identity structure, which enables them to maintain a sense of self-continuity over time and space and which provides a frame of reference for making decisions, problem-solving, and interpreting experience and self-relevant information.” {Berzonsky:2011iy}

Students with a well-developed self-identity commit, with relative ease, to the career and life choices that they are faced with. They take responsibility for their actions and are dependable over time (albeit with plenty of idiosyncrasies). They choose what they want to learn instead of procrastinating about a future which they cannot foresee. In addition they do not doubt their choices. When they change course, they do that with a positive motivation, not because they regret past decisions. They commit not only to study and career choices, they commit, gracefully and stably, to life-choices of all kinds.

Self-identity can be understood as a self-generated “theory-of-me-as-an-actor-in-the-world”, or self-theory: an explanatory structure constructed to explain and plan one’s interactions with the world. It is the basis of understanding one’s position and role in the world. The self-theory allows one to cope with challenges and respond to opportunities and in return these enrich the theory-of-me-in-the-world. Berzonsky {*Berzonsky:1989eo}, quoting Epstein, describes this self-theory as

“a theory that the individual has unwittingly constructed about him- or herself as an experiencing, functional individual … it contains major postulate systems for the nature of the world, for the nature of the self, and their interaction. Like most theories, that self-theory is a conceptual tool for accomplishing a purpose. Major purposes are to optimize the pleasure/pain balance of the individual over the course of a lifetime … and to organize the data of experience in a manner that can be coped with effectively.”

All acts leave traces in the world: some destructive (like a fire), many irrelevant (like taking one route to home and not another), and a few constructive. Constructive traces include thoroughly learning a skill, showing kindness and understanding, and honest self-reflection. These all leave constructive traces that can be beneficial in the future.

By building on constructive traces, it is possible to optimize the lifetime pleasure/pain – or happiness/misery – balance. But only if one follows a stable and realistic life-strategy. Without a realistic and stable theory-of-me-in-the-world it is impossible to formulate and follow a coherent life-strategy and hence it is impossible to maximize the returns of constructive traces left in the past. Anyone who commits to such a life-strategy proves a stable identity and exhibits, by necessity, strong and stable commitments.

Essentially, the theory-of-me-in-the-world must be rich, realistic, and self-derived. If it is shallow, unrealistic, or borrowed from others, it will simply not be up to the task of informing effective responses to the challenges of any individual life. And because it doesn’t work very well, it is not a good basis for self-esteem.

The effectiveness of a self-theory can be measured in terms of whether it helps

“to solve the personal problems it was constructed to handle [and] does it serve as a framework within which experience and […]relevant information can be meaningfully organized and understood” {*Berzonsky:1989eo}.

The more realistic and finely tuned to the situation, the more effective the theory-of-me-in-the-world assists in selecting and committing to viable and quality-of-life enhancing choices and the more it becomes a reliable basis for future actions.

Vice versa, the more the self-theory is borrowed from others, or based on how one wants or needs reality to be (instead of how it is), and the shallower and narrower it is, the more likely it is to worsen personal problems and the less likely it is that stable and productive commitments can be made.

One of the dangers is that the self-theory is only effective in a narrow set of situations.² All seems well and comfortable while little changes, but whenever reality strays away from these situations and outside the comfort zone, a narrow theory-of-me-in-the-world becomes rapidly less effective, traces left in the world provide fewer or no returns, and commitments are proven worthless ³.

The identity that seemed well developed, now effectively dissolves and with that evaporate self-esteem, self-confidence, and the feeling of being an adequate actor in the world. This is experienced as an existential threat and people in this situation will do everything to avoid it by propping up the conditions in which they feel adequate.

Preventing feelings of personal inadequacy is the root motivation of authoritarianis ⁴ {Berzonsky:1992js, Andringa:2015bc}. It is also the reasons why the term revolution is derived from the word “revolve”: revolutions are about restoring an (often imagined) previous situation in which the revolutionary felt adequate {Billington:1980vh}.

Is identity the most worthwhile outcome of youth?

It is not difficult to make the case that a well-developed identity is the most worthwhile outcome of youth. Adulthood assumes the ability to take responsibility and to be a reliable and constructive actor in the world. A well-developed identity entails a realistic, fairly comprehensive, and effective theory-of-me-in-the-world as a basis of understanding and meaning-giving that allows one to avoid problems and to benefit fully from life’s opportunities.

An unrealistic, incomplete, and ineffective self-theory – i.e., a shallow understanding of the world – is bound to lead to problems and misery when one bases oneself on self-developed plans and strategies. Superficially these plans might seem reasonable – because they worked with others or seem adapted to circumstances – but that doesn’t change the unrealism, incompleteness, and ineffectiveness that sooner or later leads to inadvertent outcomes, self-inflicted, and self-perpetuated problems, and a sense of general misery. And because the self-theory is unrealistic, incomplete, and ineffective, any diagnosis is likely to miss the point, which traps people in a self-perpetuating loop of suboptimal life-strategies that persists as long as the theory-of-me-in-the-world does not improve⁵.

Intelligence is not a protective factor in this process. The more intelligent one is, the better one is in dealing with the inadvertent outcomes of self-inflicted or self-perpetuated problems. But, on the basis of shallow understanding, intelligent “problem solving” leads to solutions that do not address the underlying causes and hence do not solve the root problem. Side-effects of these “solutions” form a seed for the development of new problems⁶. In this situation: the more intelligent one is, the more convincing the BS one tells oneself (and others).

Success and failure in life lead to general beliefs about self, society, and the world in general. Success contributes to sensing the world’s opportunities and options. Failure draws attention to problems and the lack of options: one feels trapped in a situation in which one does not want to be, and sees no way out⁷. This results in a need for guidance, for help in making life decisions, and, potentially, lifelong dependency on authorities (authoritarianism) as shapers of one’s destiny (for better or worse). Few will find this an attractive perspective, even if they have no alternative.

The development of a realistic, sufficiently complete, and effective self-theory seems the best protection against all of this and hence it is a strong contender as the most worthwhile outcome of youth⁸.

Is identity development related to mental health?

It seems that a well developed identity is also associated with complete mental health. Conversely, an underdeveloped identity leads to either a sense of misery (languishing) or even mental health problems. This relation has been clearly established for quite some time now.

Psychologists Corey Keyes {*Keyes:2005gc} defined complete mental health with the diagnostic tools that typically are used for diagnosing mental illnesses. In doing so he made mental health “diagnosable”. The table below shows “symptoms” or mental health broken down into eleven categories with a diagnostic criterion each.

The diagnostic criteria typically correspond to mental health as experiencing the world in terms of opportunities and options that one can deal with and not in terms of problems to cope with. This is a sign of personal empowerment. Together these features indicated the quality of (the many) aspects of a theory-of-me-in-the-world, and therefore a well-developed identity that can commit stably.

Mental health symptom	Mental health diagnostic criterium. Aspects of a theory of me as an actor in the world
Self-acceptance	Holds positive attitudes toward oneself and past life and concedes and accepts varied aspects of self
Social acceptance	Has positive attitude toward others while acknowledging and accepting people’s differences and complexity
Personal growth	Shows insight into own potential, sense of development, and open to new and challenging experiences
Social actualization	Believes that people, social groups, and society have potential and can evolve or grow positively
Purpose in life	Holds goals and beliefs that affirm sense of direction in life and feels that life has a purpose and meaning
Social contribution	Feels that one’s life is useful to society and the output of his or her own activities are valued by or valuable to others
Environmental mastery	Exhibits capability to manage complex environment, and can choose or manage and mold environments to suit needs
Social coherence	Interested in society or social life; feels society and culture are intelligible, somewhat logical, predictable, and meaningful
Autonomy	Exhibits self-direction that is often guided by his or her own socially accepted and conventional internal standards and resists unsavory social pressures
Positive relations with others	Has warm, satisfying, trusting personal relationships and is capable of empathy and intimacy
Social integration	Has a sense of belonging to a community and derives comfort and support from community

A proposed cluster of symptoms and diagnostic criteria for mental health (i.e., flourishing){Keyes:2005gc}. It is interesting that the opposite formulations are similar to those used to diagnose depression. In addition the criteria translate into aspects of a theory of me as actor in the world.