Introduction

What would you say if someone walked up to you and asked,

What are you?

How do you identify yourself? Does it matter who asks the question or in what social context it is asked? Does your view of what you are change over time?

I will explore these and other aspects of this seemingly simple question over time through a series of blogs, a wiki and this resource page. Join me as I take this exploration of identity.

Quotations

Here are some interesting quotes that I have found relating to identity.

In all cultures, the family imprints its members with selfhood. Human experience of identity has two elements; a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate. The laboratory in which these ingredients are mixed and dispensed is the family, the matrix of identity.

Salvador Minuchin (20th century), U.S. child psychiatrist, family therapist. Families and Family Therapy, ch. 3 (1974).

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

James Baldwin (1924–1987), U.S. author. “No Name in the Street,” The Price Of The Ticket (1972, repr. 1985).

The real meditation is ... the meditation on one’s identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you’re you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!

Ezra Pound (1885–1972), U.S. poet, critic. Letter, April 21, 1913, to Pound’s fiancée (later wife) Dorothy Shakespear. Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909-1914, eds. Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz (1985).

When I quit working, I lost all sense of identity in about fifteen minutes.

Paige Rense (b. 1929), U.S. author and editor. As quoted in the New York Times, p. 37 (February 21, 1994).

One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity—not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals.

Terri Apter (20th century), British psychologist. Altered Loves, ch. 3 (1990).