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Although the term “identity” was introduced into psychoanalytic literature by Victor Tausk in 1919, it was not till 1950 that a thorough elucidation of the concept appeared in press. This was in the form of a paper titled “Growth and crises of the healthy personality” written by Erik Erikson (1950). While Erikson later dropped the prefix “ego” to accommodate Hartmann's (1950) distinction between the “ego” and “self,” his definition of identity stood the test of time. Erikson's later work contains two views of identity: one that results from self-objectification and the other defined by the relationship of each soul to its mere existence. According to Erikson (1956), in his “The problem of ego identity” paper, identity denotes “both a persistent sameness within oneself (self-sameness) and a persistent sharing of same kind of essential character traits with others” (p. 109).

Another outstanding contributor to this realm was Heinz Lichtenstein (1963), who proposed two opposing forces being active in connection with identity: the shape-giving “identity principle” and the shape-destroying “metamorphosis.” The former originates in early mother-child relationship and refers to the perpetual drive of man to assert and maintain his historical existence and unique individuality. The latter originates in the autistic core of the self and exerts an inward pull to abandon not only assigned roles but also the human quality of existence altogether. Lichtenstein saw human life as existing in a perpetual oscillation between the two extremes of “identity principle” and “metamorphosis.”

The metapsychological and developmental refinements by subsequent contributors (especially Edith Jacobson, Margaret Mahler, and Otto Kernberg) notwithstanding, the ideas of Erikson and Lichtenstein remain central to the contemporary psychosocial phenomenology of identity. In a world that is goaded by the bifurcated prong of globalization and cultural nostalgia, it is hard to avoid the inherent tension in