Identity: Youth and Crisis

Beginning in the 1950s, Americans began to protest racial segregation and discrimination against African American citizens. Led by groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and individuals such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the movement worked to end discrimination through both legal and personal actions. These ranged from Supreme Court cases to nonviolent protests such as sit-ins and marches. Erikson, who gives the movement the anachronistic label of the “Negro revolution,” addresses the particular issues of identity in a group that is actively working toward change within a dominant culture.

Ego identity is the sense of self that humans develop through the processes of social interaction. It isn’t the same as personal identity, which derives from the perception of one’s own existence in time and space and the knowledge that others recognize this existence. Ego identity is what individuals in an identity crisis lose.

The epigenetic principle, which Erikson describes in Chapter 3, states that an organism begins with a plan for growth; its parts arise according to the plan and eventually form a functioning whole. This is true both of the fetus and the baby as it navigates its society.