Identity formation stands at the crossroads of depth psychology's most contested terrain: the question of how a self comes into being, sustains itself across time, and undergoes radical reconstruction under the pressure of developmental crisis, trauma, loss, or spiritual transformation. The corpus reveals no single doctrine but a productive tension among several positions. Jung's framework situates identity formation within the individuation process, where the ego's necessary but partial identification with persona, function, and family imago constitutes a transitional stage on the path toward a more integrated selfhood anchored in the Self archetype. Welwood, reading through a Buddhist-existentialist lens, interrogates the compulsive dimension of this process, arguing that the 'identity project' is driven by the need to compensate for a subconscious sense of deficiency — a structure that meditation and psychotherapy must jointly dismantle. Ricoeur intervenes philosophically by proposing narrative identity as the mediating concept between the immutable sameness of character and the more fragile, reflexive selfhood that persists through dramatic personal transformation. Singer and the narrative identity researchers extend this into empirical personality psychology, demonstrating that individuals construct and sustain identity across the lifespan through storied self-understanding. Siegel integrates neurodevelopmental and relational perspectives, showing that identity is simultaneously inner and inter, shaped by attachment contexts, cultural messages, and somatic experience. Simondon provides the most radical ontological account, treating individuation not as arrival at a fixed self but as an ongoing, phase-shifting resolution of pre-individual tensions. Across these voices, identity formation is never simply achieved; it is perpetually at risk, perpetually in process.
In the library
22 substantive passages
The identity structure is generally comprised of two halves: the conscious identity — a positive image of self that we actively try to promote in order to compensate for an underlying subconscious identity — a sense of deficiency that we try to cover up.
Welwood argues that identity formation is structurally bifurcated between a compensatory conscious persona and a concealed subconscious sense of deficiency, making the identity project inherently unstable and self-perpetuating.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.
Ricoeur establishes that personal identity is not a pre-given substance but a narrative construction, constituted through the dialectic of concordance and discordance that belongs to the emplotted life story.
In making claims for the centrality of narrative to ongoing identity formation, these researchers follow in the tradition of psychobiography and the idiographic study of lives.
Singer identifies narrative as the organizing principle of identity formation across the lifespan, positioning the empirical narrative identity tradition in relation to depth-psychological predecessors while distinguishing it from reduction to any single psychodynamic schema.
Singer, Jefferson A., Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004thesis
This fear of nonexistence gives rise to our ongoing identity project — the attempt to make ourselves into something solid, substantial, and real.
Welwood grounds identity formation in an existential-Buddhist reading of ontological anxiety, positing that the self-constructing project is a response to the threat of nonexistence rather than an expression of inherent nature.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
Identification then leads to the formation of a secondary character, the individual identifying with his best developed function to such an extent that he alienates himself very largely or even entirely from his original character.
Jung describes how identity formation proceeds through identification with a dominant psychological function, a necessary but alienating transitional stage on the developmental arc toward individuation.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
If identity is both inner and inter, we can see that the question of integrating identity becomes a pressing focus of our attention. Without integration, we can excessively differentiate without linkage, perhaps feeling isolated as a solo-self.
Siegel argues that identity formation is simultaneously intrapsychic and relational, shaped from the womb by bodily, familial, and cultural messages, and requiring integration across these dimensions to avoid pathological fragmentation.
Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis
It may well be that the most dramatic transformations of personal identity pass through the crucible of this nothingness of identity, a nothingness that would be the equivalent of the empty square in the transformations so dear to Lévi-Strauss.
Ricoeur proposes that radical identity reconstruction — as witnessed in conversion narratives — requires a passage through an apophatic zero-point where sameness collapses and only the naked question 'Who am I?' remains.
The ego structure as a whole thus contains both a deficient, subconscious identity and a compensatory, conscious identity. Because subconscious identities are more hidden and threatening than conscious identities, they are also much harder to acknowledge, dislodge, and transform.
Welwood elaborates the therapeutic stakes of identity formation, arguing that the subconscious layer of the identity structure requires the relational context of psychotherapy — not meditation alone — to be effectively worked through.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
Individuals' ongoing sense of self in contemporary Western society coheres around a narrative structure, which casts the individual as a protagonist in a lifelong journey, marked by the mutual challenges of intimacy and autonomy.
Singer synthesizes McAdams's framework to show that identity formation in contemporary Western persons is organized around a narrative self-understanding that integrates the competing developmental demands of intimacy and autonomy.
Singer, Jefferson A., Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004supporting
It will be the task of a reflection on narrative identity to balance, on one side, the immutable traits which this identity owes to the anchoring of the history of a life in a character and, on the other, those traits which tend to separate the identity of the self from the sameness of character.
Ricoeur articulates the central dialectical task of narrative identity: holding in productive tension the character-anchored permanence of selfhood against the capacity for self-transformation that exceeds sedimented traits.
The fact that our capacity to turn experience into narrative emerges from a social cognitive developmental process defines another point of intersection for this group of narrative identity researchers.
Singer highlights the socio-cognitive developmental origins of narrative identity, emphasizing that the capacity for self-story construction emerges through staged maturation within relational and cultural contexts.
Singer, Jefferson A., Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004supporting
The ego tends to identify with the roles it plays in life... even so, there is always more to the ego than persona identification. People will usually still recognize a difference between role and true inner identity.
Stein, following Jung, distinguishes persona-identification from core identity, arguing that identity formation involves a tension between social role adoption and a deeper, archetypal-individual core that resists full absorption into the persona.
Stein, Murray, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
He therefore promotes social functioning. In addition, he is vital for the formation of generational and gender identity. If the father is emotionally absent, the onus of differentiation falls elsewhere.
Samuels, drawing on post-Jungian object-relations perspectives, shows that identity formation — particularly generational and gender identity — depends critically on the quality of paternal presence and its role in facilitating psychological differentiation.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
Our self-structure is under the sway of a more primitive capacity — identification. Because we lack the capacity to reflect on our experience, identity forms prereflectively.
Welwood locates the developmental roots of identity formation in prereflective identification, the primary psychic mechanism operative before the capacity for self-reflection matures in adolescence, aligning with both Piagetian and Buddhist developmental accounts.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
One way to frame the overall process of what the IS does is as a continual process of asking the ego 'who are you?'. The way it attempts to answer this question is by telling stories: lots of them and continuously.
Goodwyn casts the psyche's spontaneous image-making activity as an ongoing interrogation of identity, framing the unconscious storyteller as an endogenous agent in the self-formation process through narrative integration.
Goodwyn, Erik D., Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller, 2018supporting
Because perpetrators of complex trauma are so frequently those with whom a survivor was or is emotionally intimate, the survivor's identities may overlap with those of her or his perpetrators, creating understandable confusion.
Courtois demonstrates how complex trauma disrupts identity formation through the pathological overlap of victim and perpetrator identifications, producing structural dissociation and identity confusion as sequelae of relational abuse.
Courtois, Christine A, Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders (Adults) supporting
Jung's developmental theory of individuation is the 'process by which a person becomes a psychological in-dividual, that is, a separate, indivisible unity or whole.'
Dennett situates Jungian individuation as the depth-psychological model of identity formation par excellence, framing recovery from addiction as a recapitulation of the developmental arc toward psychological wholeness and authentic selfhood.
Dennett, Stella, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025supporting
Individuation that is life is conceived as the discovery in a conflictual situation of a new axiomatic that incorporates and unifies all the elements of this situation into a system that contains the individual.
Simondon proposes a radical ontological alternative to substance-based identity models, conceiving individuation — and thus identity formation — as the ongoing, conflict-driven resolution of pre-individual tensions into new systemic configurations.
Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
It is within the framework of narrative theory that the concrete dialectic of selfhood and sameness — and not simply the nominal distinction between the two terms — attains its fullest development.
Ricoeur argues that narrative theory alone provides the conceptual resources to resolve the philosophical puzzles of personal identity by articulating the living dialectic between the unchanging sameness of character and the ethically responsive selfhood of the person.
Enabling the youth to think of the memory as a past experience that is over and done, and that can be recalled... and placed within the youth's larger personal story of her or his life (i.e., narrative reconstruction).
Courtois frames trauma-focused therapeutic intervention as a process of narrative reconstruction through which the traumatic memory is re-integrated into the survivor's larger personal story, thereby restoring the continuity of identity formation.
Courtois, Christine A, Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders (Adults) supporting
What religion is and how religious identity is conceived and shaped differ from place to place, even in the present day... religious identity is understood as a matter of individual choice.
King offers a comparative-historical observation that religious identity formation is culturally variable and context-dependent, complicating universalist psychological accounts of how group and individual identities are constituted.
And gender identity formation... early learning, and cortical blood flow... emotional learning and right hemisphere.
Schore's index entry signals that gender identity formation is anchored in early neurobiological learning processes, particularly those mediated by the right hemisphere and limbic-orbitofrontal circuits, situating identity formation within affective neuroscience.
Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994aside