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The central and centering concept of The I is the notion of “Identity theme.” With the combined qualifications of literary critic and psychoanalyst, Holland explores his theme of continuity in an individual's growth and development of an active, experiencing self—of an “unchanging inner core against which [one] can read every phase of [one's] life from the most public to the most personal.“
Drawing on Heinz Lichtenstein's (1977) The Dilemma of Human Identity, Holland defines identity as having three simultaneous meanings: (1) agency, (2) consequence, and (3) representation. To this threefold concept, he has given the acronym ARC (of which “I” is all three). Holland explains:
As an agency, the I tries out on the world the guesses, hypotheses, strategies, or behaviors by which we create perceptions that we find satisfying. As a consequence, the I is what results when these hypotheses and strategies and behaviors feed back as perceptions onto—into—the self. The I as consequence is the sum or history of all that has happened to the I, everything the I as agent has shaped into a coherent self in response to the “feel” of those feedings back. That coherent self is also, however, somebody's representation of a somebody. An I is not just something “there” inside us, which our descriptions come more or less close to. We do not “have” identities. Rather, identity is the way somebody represents an I, usually in words. Identity as I propose it is a relational term. Identity is between people, and because identity consists of words between people, identity presupposes a cultural realm of shared ideas and shared ways to represent them—language.
The aspect of representation introduces into the concept of identity the dialectic of sameness and difference that characterizes a human life. One way of phrasing that characteristic direction or pattern, as Lichtenstein suggests, is to formulate an identity as a theme with variations. Holland thus asks us to imagine a human life as a dialect