ESSAY

Concept of Identity and Deviant Behaviour

Concept of Identity

Introduction

The study of identity development, the psychological description of how individuals form an identity as they mature from childhood into adulthood, was the foundation out of which much of identity research began and exponentially grew through the last half of the 20th century until today. With its roots in the early emergence of developmental stage theory, the field of identity development has grown increasingly mature as it has moved beyond simpler categories of stages and statuses into more complex interdisciplinary research involving cultural, cognitive, and neurological components of the developing human and the role of identity across an individual's life span. This entry reviews the theoretical underpinnings of identity development, the status paradigm of identity formation, the general critiques of stage and status measures, and the recent psychological research in this field (Becker, 1973, pp. 771-788).

Concept of Identity

Erik Erikson, a theorist who founded and popularized the psychological study of identity, originally spoke of identity as a central ego achievement to be reached in adolescence. Originally a child psychoanalyst, Erikson was trained by Sigmund Freud and adapted his psychosexual stage model of childhood into a broader model of human development, which incorporated the biology, psychology, and sociology of the developing person. Instead of Freud's focus on pathology and sexuality rooted in childhood, Erikson's eight-stage model of psychosocial development describes a positive ego task for each stage of life from infancy through old age. Incorporating an epigenetic assumption (the morphological study of how organs must sequentially develop in utero), Erikson argued that the epigenetic process continues to meet certain biologically rooted tasks across the life span. Integrating cultural ethnography, Erikson argued that these developmental tasks can be culturally influenced and met in many different ways, but the primary sequence and general age of each stage task are quite consistent (Goode, 2001, pp. 42-68).

According to Erikson, after the fourth stage of industry versus inferiority (when societies often use education and play to teach the tools of that culture), puberty initiates the fifth stage—the desire to focus on ego identity. One's ego identity (ego comes from the Latin nominative pronoun I) is formed from simpler identifications made in childhood and then integrated into a coherent sense of self in adolescence. Erikson theorized that, through evolution, the adolescent is biologically wired to seek social resources for this identity process during this time of life. Illustrating the interdisciplinary quality of Erikson's psychosocial model, the psychological person is designed to pull identity content from the relative and always changing cultural resources (Downes and Paul, 2003, pp. 17-34).

Approaches

Structural Functionalism

It is an approach to social explanation associated with the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, although it has also been influential within political science (and political sociology, in particular) (Patricia and Adler, 2000, pp. 42-63).

Functionalists are concerned with the properties of systems of interaction, arguing that these systems cannot be reduced to component actions of individual actors. They argue that society should be understood as made ...