The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [146]
It is the ultimate and most paradoxically absurd possible defence, beyond which magic defences can go no further. And it, in one or other of its forms, is the basic defence, so far as I have been able to see, in every form of psychosis. It can be stated in its most general form as: the denial of being, as a means of preserving being. The schizophrenic feels he has killed his “self,” and this appears to be in order to avoid being killed. He is dead, in order to remain alive.[5]
But, as has been pointed out, the concern with beliefs involving a sense of identity is of even wider scope, having application to normal persons no less than to schizophrenics and to other persons suffering from pathological states. Erik H. Erikson[6] has contributed more than anyone else to our general theoretical understanding of the development of a sense of identity, in his careful and detailed descriptions of the various stages in the formation of identity and in the crises of identity which face each person as he proceeds from life to death. In so doing, Erikson has enriched immeasurably the psychoanalytic theory of personality development, a theory meant to apply to all human beings, which describes the unfolding of each human personality in terms of passage from a first phase of identity and crisis of identity in “infancy” through a series of seven additional phases culminating in “adulthood” and “mature age.”[7]
The theme of identity will also be found in many other writings. Mention may be made here of the works of Helen Merrell Lynd, Edith Weigert, Paul Federn, Carl Rogers, the existentialists, Erich Fromm, Abraham H. Maslow, and Gordon Allport, all of whom are concerned with the problem of identity, even though they employ other concepts, such as estrangement, depersonalization, loneliness and isolation, self-alienation, anomie, becoming, existence, self-actualization, and self-realization.[8]
A number of these writers have pointed eloquently to the pervasiveness of the problem of identity in modern society.
Edith Weigert writes:
One could speculate why the problem of identity concerns us so much in our time. It concerns not only the psychiatric patient who is particularly inflexible or helplessly volatile in the face of change— there is a general insecurity about identity in our time.[9]
Allen Wheelis:
During the past fifty years there has been a change in the experienced quality of life, with a result that identity is now harder to achieve and harder to maintain. The formally dedicated Marxist who now is unsure of everything; the Christian who loses his faith; the workman who comes to feel that his work is piecemeal and meaningless; the scientist who decides that science is futile, that the fate of the world will be determined by power politics—such persons are of our time, and they suffer the loss or impairment of identity.[10]
Helen Merrell Lynd:
Awareness of loneliness, of isolation, is one of the most characteristic experiences of the contemporary world. Marx’s chief condemnation of capitalism is that it alienates the individual. The phenomenon of individual isolation is a cornerstone of existential philosophy, and the fact of alienation in the contemporary world is one thing that gives existentialism its contemporary appeal. Freud regards separation and fear of separation as one of the main factors in anxiety. The situation of isolation is a central theme in Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, in Sullivan’s psychology of interpersonal relations and in Durkheim’s and Merton’s analysis of anomie.[11]
I have offered all these examples simply to point up