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By Root 469 0

and Ruth, eight and five at the time, had been quarreling and continued to quarrel as we sat down to the evening meal. I asked them to stop but they ignored me. They also ignored several additional requests, increasingly less gently put. Completely involved with each other, they paid no attention to me. In my desire to put an end to it, and possibly motivated unconsciously by other preoccupations, such as those described earlier, I turned to them and, addressing each by the other’s name, demanded they stop. The quarrel was immediately forgotten. To my surprise, they turned from each other toward me with laughter and delight. They had interpreted my action as a new game I had invented for their amusement, and they urged me to continue it. I did.

But not for long. Within a few minutes Ruth, the younger, became somewhat uncertain about whether we still were playing and asked for reassurance: “Daddy, this is a game, isn’t it?”

“No,” I replied, “it’s for real.”

We played on a bit longer, but soon both girls became disturbed and apprehensive. Then they pleaded with me to stop—which of course I did. The entire incident took less than ten minutes.

I had violated their primitive belief in their own identities—a belief they had in the first place learned in no small measure from me. For the first time in their lives, something had led them to experience serious doubts about a fact they had previously taken completely for granted, and this sent both of them into a panic reaction. The stimulus that evoked it seemed on the surface trivial enough. It involved nothing more than changing a single word. But this word represents the most succinct summary of many beliefs, all of which together make up one’s sense of identity.

To be sure, children love to pretend they are someone else; but this is so only if the child can pick his own role, control the outcome, and thus maintain throughout his sense of identity. In the incident just described, the initial delight quickly gave way to anxiety because the girls were no longer sure whether the play-acting was in fun or real, and because they could no longer control the outcome.

Several of my colleagues have played the name-reversal game with their own children, with the same results. The panic reaction invariably followed within a few minutes. But when the experiment was repeated in a nursery school with an adult who was a stranger to the children, the results were quite different. No anxiety effects were observed; the children were able to ward them off by some such remark as: “You don’t know who I am because you don’t know my mother.” Apparently children have somehow learned that a stranger is not in a position to know one’s name, and therefore they are not affected as they are when one of their parents, a person who is certainly in a position to know, violates their sense of themselves.

It is possible to point to other examples which suggest how very sensitive we are about maintaining our primitive belief in our own identity. Who among us has not experienced some irritation when our name is forgotten or when a teacher persists in calling us by a wrong name? The O.S.S. Assessment Staff, in their well-known study of candidates for espionage work in World War II,[9] found that when a person of high military rank is ordered to report for duty at a post where he is not known, dressed in army fatigues and under an assumed name, he is very likely to show symptoms of severe disturbance in his sense of identity. Under certain circumstances, some people find it necessary to change their names; for example, actors and actresses, members of minority groups, refugees, and those who are fleeing from the police. The changed name often has structural similarities to the original one. Often, the first letters of the Christian name and the surname remain the same, as if to suggest a need for continuity of identity even though there has been a change in name.

The problem of identity in twins is especially interesting in this connection. What must it be like to be continually confused with someone else,