Personal identity in the face of change: between destiny and choice
ENDuring the last few decades an increase in the preoccupation with identity issues is observed which can be explained by the difficulties caused by the “postmodern” complexity of social life and social relations. The scientific study of identity was initiated by the works of psychologists and by now has a long history. Its beginning is commonly associated with the work of original thinker, William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890). However, the topic soon became interdisciplinary as students of identity had inevitably to refer to such individual, social, and cultural phenomena as thoughts, emotions, interpersonal relations, role performance, etc. Identity has been defined in a great variety of ways, which sometimes are very controversial and conflict with one another. For example, according to the definition presented in The Concise Encyclopaedia of Psychology, “Personal identity refers to a sense of sameness or continuity of the self, despite environmental changes and individual growth”. Similarly, The International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences states that “a subjective sense of identity is a sense of sameness and continuity as an individual”. In the same line, American anthropologist, Dorothy Holland, defines identity as “a self-understanding or self-objectification to which one is emotionally attached” (Holland 1997: 162). All these definitions of identity emphasize perception of selfhood by an individual as the essence of identity. That is, their attention is concentrated on individual self-consciousness, which means that they treat identity as subjective in its nature.
