Identity Formation

identity reconstruction

Identity formation occupies a generative tension throughout the depth-psychology corpus, engaging questions that neither clinical nor purely philosophical frameworks resolve in isolation. The literature distributes along several competing axes. From the Jungian vantage, Jung himself locates identity formation in the dialectic between identification and individuation: the secondary character produced through identification with one’s most developed function is understood as a necessary but ultimately transitional structure on the path toward authentic selfhood. Murray Stein and Ann Ulanov elaborate this frame, showing how persona, shadow, and the Self-as-regulating-center all participate in the diachronic unfolding of who one becomes. John Welwood, drawing on Buddhist phenomenology, reframes identity formation as an anxious ‘identity project’—an endless attempt to solidify what is by nature groundless—against which both psychotherapy and contemplative practice must work. Paul Ricoeur offers the most architecturally precise account: narrative identity mediates between the sameness of character and the selfhood that persists through transformation, with the ‘concordant-discordant synthesis’ of story the only viable bridge across temporal discontinuity. Jefferson Singer and the narrative identity researchers extend this into empirical personality psychology, treating the life story as the operative mechanism of selfhood across the lifespan. Daniel Siegel adds the neurobiological and interpersonal register, arguing that identity integration—inner and inter—is the pressing developmental task. Together these voices reveal identity formation as inherently relational, temporally structured, and never finally achieved.

In the library 23 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 self-image and a hidden subconscious sense of deficiency, rendering the ‘identity project’ inherently unstable.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis

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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 constituted through narrative: the character’s identity is inseparable from the story’s concordant-discordant structure, making identity formation an ongoing narratological achievement.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis

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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 establishes narrative as the central mechanism of identity formation across the lifespan, positioning this claim within a tradition that resists reduction to any single grand psychodynamic theory.

Singer, Jefferson A., Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004thesis

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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 identifies the formation of a secondary character through function-identification as a necessary transitional stage in development, one that obscures true individuality by driving it into the unconscious.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921thesis

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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 frames identity formation as an integration problem spanning internal experience and relational embeddedness, arguing that failure of integration produces isolation or fusion rather than coherent selfhood.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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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 argues that radical identity transformation—as attested in conversion narratives—requires passing through a moment of identity-dissolution that is not annihilation but the naked openness of the ‘who?’ question.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis

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identity is a life story (McAdams, 1987). That is, 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

Singer endorses McAdams’s thesis that identity in contemporary Western culture is organized as a life-story, casting the individual as protagonist navigating the dual challenges of intimacy and autonomy.

Singer, Jefferson A., Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004supporting

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Because subconscious identities are more hidden and threatening than conscious identities, they are also much harder to acknowledge, dislodge, and transform.

Welwood specifies that identity reconstruction must address the subconscious deficient identity, which is more resistant to change than the compensatory conscious identity and requires relational psychotherapeutic work to dislodge.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting

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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 specifies that narrative identity theory must hold in tension the stable character-traits that anchor a life and the transformative selfhood that can depart from that character, resisting ideological fixation.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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our capacity to turn experience into narrative emerges from a social cognitive developmental process… Wedding Piaget and Erikson, these researchers trace the use of narrative through progressive stages of cognitive growth

Singer situates narrative identity formation within a lifespan developmental framework, arguing that the capacity to construct a coherent life story emerges through cognitively and socially staged processes.

Singer, Jefferson A., Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004supporting

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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 can render the sameness-selfhood distinction concrete and dynamic, making it indispensable to any adequate account of personal identity formation.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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the ego tends to identify with the roles it plays in life… people will usually still recognize a difference between role and true inner identity. The ego’s core is archetypal as well as individual and person

Stein clarifies that while persona-identification shapes the social surface of identity, the ego retains an archetypal core that sustains an inner sense of selfhood distinct from role-performance.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting

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our awareness is essentially open and receptive, yet the capacity to reflect on our own experience does not fully develop until the early teenage years… Until then, our self-structure is under the sway of a more primitive capacity—identification

Welwood traces identity formation to a developmental shift from prereflective identification to reflective self-awareness, with the earlier stage leaving formative and often problematic imprints on the self-structure.

Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting

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the IS attempts to tie together the pieces of a person’s life, trying to work it into a coherent narrative. And so it provides the materials to answer the question just as it poses it

Goodwyn argues that the psyche’s spontaneous image-making function continuously poses the identity question—‘who are you?’—while simultaneously supplying narrative materials toward its resolution.

Goodwyn, Erik D., Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller, 2018supporting

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he is vital for the formation of generational and gender identity. If the father is emotionally absent, the onus of di

Samuels, drawing on post-Jungian clinical research, emphasizes the paternal function as structurally necessary for the formation of generational and gender identity, with absence producing developmental burden.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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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 frames Jungian individuation as the depth-psychological template for identity formation in recovery contexts, emphasizing movement toward an integrated wholeness rather than a fixed endpoint.

Dennett, Stella, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025supporting

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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 by creating identity-overlap between victim and perpetrator, necessitating careful clinical work to differentiate and reconstruct a coherent selfhood.

Courtois, Christine A, Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders (Adults) supporting

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Character is the finite openness of my existence taken as a whole… sameness in mineness… The present study will place narrativity in a comparable position of mediation between two extremes.

Ricoeur positions character as ‘sameness in mineness’—a finite anchoring of identity—while assigning narrativity the mediating role between the immutable and the transformable dimensions of selfhood.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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the conscious ego, becomes aware of, and engages in a dialectical encounter with, the unconscious, encompassing both the repressed contents of biographical experience and complexes

Dennett outlines the ego-Self dialectic as the operative engine of Jungian identity formation, requiring the ego to engage both personal and collective unconscious layers in order to develop toward wholeness.

Dennett, Stella, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025supporting

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placing within the youth’s larger personal story of her or his life (i.e., narrative reconstruction)

Courtois treats trauma memory work as narrative reconstruction—integrating fragmentary experience into the coherent personal story that constitutes identity, particularly for young trauma survivors.

Courtois, Christine A, Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders (Adults) supporting

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relation to the world and to the collective, is a dimension of individuation in which the individual participates based on pre-individual reality, which progressively individuates

Simondon proposes that individuation—and by extension identity formation—is never complete in the individual alone but proceeds through relational participation in collective and transindividual dimensions of being.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside

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what religion is and how religious identity is conceived and shaped differ from place to place, even in the present day

King notes the cultural and historical contingency of religious identity formation, cautioning against projecting modern Western assumptions about individual identity onto ancient or non-Western contexts.

Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003aside

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