Identity and the Experience of Specificity in a Process of Recognition: Commentary on Seligman and Shanok

In this timely and detailed effort to explicate and enlarge upon the enduring contribution to the “problem of identity” introduced, some 45 years ago, by Erik Erikson (1950), the authors seek to craft an even wider synthesis, bringing together a broad inclusiveness of perspectives that offers a way of integrating the classical psychoanalytic with the more recent object relations, self-psychological, and, especially, systems viewpoints. At least three main statements seem to emerge from the complexity of the paper: The first is that “identity” must be thought of as an ongoing, lifelong, integrative process, not as a feature having the static fixity of structure nor as a developmental outcome of childhood; the second is that “self” must be conceived of as being held within the actual exchanges with one's ongoing personal-social-historical context, not apart from it; and third, the process within which the unity of person seeks to organize its coherence involves the continuing negotiation of a complex array of dialectic tensions among numerous polarities inherent in the constraints and components that constitute the system.

It is possible, within the limits of this discussion, to address only two features of this complex paper, in which the significance of the authors' message can become obscured by the breadth of the synthesis they attempt. The first concerns the matter of inclusiveness itself, both its scope and its significance. The second directs attention to what that process might actually be that allows, or enables, the coherence or unity, which the authors seek to assemble under the concept of