(Since this stage is of particular interest to high school students, I usually devote more time to it.)
Erikson sees identity as “the capacity to see oneself as having continuity and sameness.”
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People need to know that they can trust themselves to behave and feel as they expect to behave and feel in any situation. They need to feel they know themselves. It is equally important that others recognize this consistency. A sense of identity also includes the ability to adapt one’s needs to the opportunities the environment offers. One may decide, for example, that one’s true nature is that of a Victorian woman. One may dress, decorate one’s surroundings, speak, and hold the values of that era. However, being a Victorian woman in the 1980s does not give back rewards or a sense of being a part of something. Rather, a person would feel isolated and alienated.
This identity crisis involves the decisions necessary to carry out an adult life: What will I do with my life? Whom will I live with? What religious persuasion, if any, shall I follow? What will my ideals, values, and political beliefs be? These questions involve a separation from parents and other authority figures. A distancing is necessary in order to question and concomitant with this separation is an immersion into other life-styles and experiences.
Activities
Probably over a thousand identity activities have been designed over the past decade, the “age of relevance.” I have selected one that I have used successfully with all types of students: Personality Wheels.
Have students individually draw a wheel with ten spokes. Each space between the spokes should be filled with an adjective that answers the question who are you or what are you. (For less advanced students, this activity also serves as a way of teaching/reinforcing adjectives.)
Next, ask the class to draw another wheel and fill in the spaces with nouns that explain why you are what you are. What people, places, and events have influenced who you are. There does not have to be a one-to-one correspondence between the adjectives and nouns.
Finally ask them to draw the wheel once more and fill in the spaces with verbs that answer the question how you are becoming what you will be. What words show how you behave? For example: I listen and respond to people; I joke around; I dance; I smoke marijuana when I am upset.
Students should then choose a person to share their wheels with and talk about what occurred to then as they worked on the wheels. A way to expand this is to have students in small groups choose one of the adjectives from each student’s wheel that describes them. For homework then each student has to try to be only that adjective. If the adjective was “positive,” the student would have to try to be only “positive” for an hour and then write up what happened and how it felt.
Reading
After introducing and defining identity, then I usually read a novel or play. I have chosen to write here about
The Member of the
Wedding
by Carson McCullers.
After the students have read Part I, have them write for fifteen minutes without putting down their pen, (a technique called “spontaneous monologue”) about how the first part of the book made them feel. If students cannot think of what to write, have them keep writing the same word over and over again.
Then, try a sharing circle with the handle: A time that I could identify with the feelings that Frankie had that spring and summer was . . . . or I felt “in-between” when . . . .
Certainly the first part explains the breaking away from childhood and immerses us in Frankie’s feeling of role-confusion. She is not a member of anything. Her best friend has moved away. The older girls will not accept her in their club. Her father has kicked her out of bed because she has grown so much. She is neither a child nor an adult.
She tries on several roles that spring and summer: Freak, Rebel, and Member of the Wedding. She describes herself as a Freak like the circus people because she has grown so much she won’t fit under the grape arbor. She has grown four inches and given herself a crew cut. She feels sad and doesn’t know why. In the spring she offered to donate blood but was turned down because she was too young.
As a Rebel, she commits a sin with Barney and then is disgusted. She has stolen a couple of times. She even throws a knife at Berenice in a fit of rage after Berenice has teased her. These little outbreaks that keep re-occurring are bothersome to Frankie as she drags through the dog days.
Her resolve at the end of Part I is to be a Member of the Wedding. This will solve everything; she will live with her brother and sister-in-law and leave town. Her confidence and self-respect have returned. One can picture her glowing!
Yet beneath all of this role-experimentation is the clinging to John Henry and Berenice for comfort and company. What would she do without the card games? She needs someone to yell at and reject who will keep returning and love her as she is.
In the second part,
F. Jasmine’s
trip to town represents a transition from child to adolescent. With her newly-found confidence and purpose she sets out on an adventure. In one day F. Jasmine drinks her first beer, buys a sexy dress, has her first conversation with Berenice about love, is initiated into adulthood by Berenice with a cigarette-smoking ritual, has her fortune told, and ends the day with a date! (This same image of an adventure is used by the Hubleys in their animated film:
Everybody Rides the Carousel
. Showing the film at this point would be excellent since the identity stage is explained by using the image of a funhouse.)
Discuss this part of the book by listing in class all the events of that one day. Why is each event included? What do they mean as a whole.
In discussing the final part of the book guide students to see that the protagonist resolves her identity-role confusion conflict temporarily, but definitely reserves herself a place in adolescentdom. She has a friend. She is now a member of a group and has forgotten the turmoil of the wedding and the summer. She is moving into a new house with her father, aunt, and uncle (John Henry’s parents) and will live a more “normal” life. Berenice is leaving the family to marry T. T. Williams. Both Berenice and John Henry, her pals from the summer, are being removed from her life—a real separation from childhood with the accompanying pain symbolized by John Henry’s sudden death. Yet the tone of confidence in Frances is genuine and believable, far different from the far-fetched confidence of Frankie at the end of Part I.
As a final activity I would have the students repeat the personality wheels for “Frances” and compare their answers in small groups. At this point I have also staged a “coming-out party” and had students make their own calling cards. Only the right sense of frivolity can make this work!
The last three stages are usually covered quickly and with less intensity. For Intimacy and Isolation I have students talk about the differences between alone and lonely and try to act out the differences. For Generativity and Self-Absorption invite adults to come into class and react to what Erikson says about this stage. Ask them: Do they need to feel useful? Have there been periods of Self-absorption like this in their lives? Try having students read
Catch 30,
Gail Sheehy’s work from
Passages
or read Tillie Olson’s,
I Stand Here Ironing.
Finally the last stage: Integrity and Despair should involve students with the issue of aging. If there are Gray Panthers in the area, invite them to speak. Have students interact in some way with older people in the community. Try role-playing where students are handicapped in some way to simulate arthritis, blindness, or deafness. Have them carry out normal everyday routines: taking care of grandchildren, shopping, talking on the telephone. For a sophisticated group, “A Conversation with my Father,” by Grace Paley, would make a challenging reading assignment. Focus on whether or not the relationship described by the story is one of tolerance, real love and devotion, or insensitivity.
As a way of concluding the unit, review all the stages for the students so that they see what all the conflicts are. But, a traditional final exam never has seemed to make much sense to me. Since my main goal has been to see if they have gained insight about age differences and how people develop throughout the life cycle, I have asked them to re-write their original essay: How does age make a difference in terms of the way people think, feel, and act? They can then compare their original essays to the final one.
