Identity occupies contested terrain across the depth-psychology corpus, where it is neither a stable possession nor a mere illusion but a locus of unceasing dialectical tension. Ricoeur provides the most technically precise treatment, distinguishing idem-identity (sameness, numerical and qualitative permanence through time) from ipse-identity (selfhood, the 'who' that holds itself answerable through promise and narrative). For Ricoeur, the concept of narrative identity mediates these poles, permitting the person to be understood as a character whose concordant-discordant story constitutes, rather than merely reflects, who one is. Welwood, approaching from a Buddhist-psychological vantage, treats the identity structure as a compensatory edifice erected against the primal fear of nonexistence: a conscious identity masking a subconscious deficiency, both requiring dissolution rather than consolidation. Jung earlier distinguished primitive family identity — an a priori participation mystique — from identification, a secondary, developmentally necessary but ultimately alienating process, locating authentic selfhood only at the end of individuation. Hillman resists reductive numerical accounts of individuality, insisting that uniqueness is qualitative, constituted by character's 'lasting sameness.' Berry, reading through Narcissus, warns that psychology's obsession with identity may itself mirror narcissistic self-enclosure. Jaynes positions the consciously constructed self as a late, fragile achievement of post-bicameral mind. The corpus thus holds identity as simultaneously indispensable and deceptive — a necessary fiction that must be inhabited, interrogated, and ultimately surrendered.
In the library
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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 is a compensatory structure split between a promoted conscious self-image and a suppressed subconscious sense of deficiency, both sustained by an endless and ultimately futile 'identity project.'
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
numerical identity: thus, we say of two occurrences of a thing, designated by an invariable noun in ordinary language, that they do not form two different things but 'one and the same' thing. Here, identity denotes one-ness
Ricoeur systematically unpacks identity into numerical, qualitative, and temporal components, establishing the conceptual ground for distinguishing sameness (idem) from selfhood (ipse) as the two irreducible axes of personal identity.
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's central thesis holds that personal identity is not a given substrate but a narrative construction: the dynamic concordance of a life story constitutes the identity of the person who lives it.
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 frames narrative identity as the mediating concept that holds in tension the immutable traits of character (idem) and the irreducible selfhood of the person (ipse), preventing either pole from collapsing into the other.
Parfit attacks the basic beliefs underlying our use of identity criteria. For didactic purposes, our ordinary beliefs regarding personal identity can be arranged in three series of assertions. The first concerns what we are to understand by identity, namely the separate existence of a core of permanence
Ricoeur engages Parfit's reductionist challenge to personal identity, using it to expose the presupposed selfhood that survives even when sameness criteria are dismantled.
This fear of nonexistence gives rise to our ongoing identity project—the attempt to make ourselves into something solid, substantial, and real.
Welwood grounds the identity project in the existential terror of nonexistence, connecting Buddhist teachings on impermanence with the psychological drive to construct a fixed, defensible self.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
everything leads me to think that Parfit, by reason of not distinguishing between selfhood and sameness, aims at the former through the latter
Ricoeur argues that Parfit's dissolution of personal identity fails because it conflates sameness with selfhood, thereby attacking a target — the immutable self-as-substance — that the ipse-identity thesis never required.
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 acknowledges that identity can undergo radical dissolution — a 'nothingness of identity' — through which conversion and transformation become possible, without the question 'who?' disappearing entirely.
Identification with parents or the closest members of the family is a normal phenomenon in so far as it coincides with the a priori family identity. In this case it is better not to speak of identification but of identity, a term that expresses the actual situation.
Jung distinguishes primordial family identity — an a priori participation mystique — from secondary identification, situating original identity as unconscious merger that individuation must differentiate.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
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 work, arguing that the hidden subconscious pole of the identity structure is more resistant to change than the conscious persona and requires direct relational engagement.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
It's much simpler to think of one's self and identity and subjectivity as separate from the world of echoes—the shape of one's self and experience as different from the shape of surroundings. Narcissus, we must remember, is self-enclosed and one. If anyone has 'identity,' Narcissus has it.
Berry implicates psychology's preoccupation with identity in the Narcissus myth, suggesting that the very drive toward a bounded, self-contained identity is a narcissistic defense against the relational, echoing nature of psychic life.
Berry, Patricia, Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis
Character, I would say today, is sameness in mineness.
Ricoeur condenses his earlier analysis of character into a pithy formula, identifying character as the form of sameness that is inhabited from within — owned, borne, lived — rather than observed from outside.
Bicameral individuals had stable identities, names to which they or others could attach epithets, but such verbal identity is a far shallower form of behavior than the consciously constructed although variable, fragile, and defensive self that shakily pilots us through the alternatives of living consciously.
Jaynes distinguishes pre-conscious verbal identity markers from the modern consciously constructed self, placing the emergence of reflexive personal identity within his evolutionary-historical account of the bicameral mind's breakdown.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
Since uniqueness depends on the qualitative differences forming the consistent sameness of your individuality, the idea of character is necessary
Hillman argues that genuine individuality is qualitative rather than numerical, grounded in the lasting sameness of character — a position that resists both biological reductionism and legal-political anonymity.
Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
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 employed up until now — attains its fullest development.
Ricoeur announces that narrative theory alone can give the selfhood/sameness distinction its proper concreteness, moving from abstract conceptual discrimination to the lived temporal structure of a human life.
identity results from a comparison, Locke introduces the singular idea of the identity of a thing with itself (of 'sameness with itself'). It is indeed by comparing a thing with itself in different times that we form the ideas of identity and diversity
Ricoeur traces Locke's foundational contribution to the problem of personal identity — the idea of self-comparison across time — while noting that it already contains in embryo the decomposition into sameness and selfhood.
When he finally recognized that this strategy was a highly intelligent move, designed to protect him from attack, rather than evidence of real incompetence, the fog disappeared and allowed him to start working on this old identity more directly.
Welwood illustrates through clinical vignette how a fixed identity structure functions as an intelligent but ultimately imprisoning protective strategy, the recognition of which initiates genuine therapeutic transformation.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
Identity or self-production can be achieved only 'by way of a continuous moving beyond the given condition.' If the organism must change its matter in order to maintain its identity, then the organism must aim beyond itself, beyond its present condition or point-identity in the here and now.
Thompson, via Jonas, grounds biological and psychological identity in autopoietic self-transcendence: the organism maintains its identity only through continuous metabolic departure from its present state, making identity inherently dynamic.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
the survivor's identities may overlap with those of her or his perpetrators, creating understandable confusion and difficulties when defenses of splitting are engaged, as is so frequently the case in the aftermath of overwhelming abuse or neglect.
Courtois demonstrates the clinical consequences of identity disruption in complex trauma, where structural dissociation fragments the self and the survivor's sense of identity becomes entangled with that of perpetrators.
Courtois, Christine A, Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders (Adults) supporting
the concept of person, just as that of physical body, is held to be a primitive concept, to the extent that there is no way to go beyond it, without presupposing it in the argument that would claim to derive it from something else.
Ricoeur establishes, following Strawson, that the person is a primitive concept for any theory of identity, meaning no reductive derivation of personal identity from more basic entities can succeed without circularity.
There is a power of spiritual perception of the object and all that it contains or is, perceived in an enveloping and pervading identity, the identity itself constituting the perception.
Aurobindo describes a mode of spiritual cognition in which identity with the known object is not a precondition but the very act of perception, dissolving the subject-object duality underlying conventional notions of personal identity.
what makes Serbs Serbs, Sinhalese Sinhalese, or French Canadians French Canadians, or anybody anybody, is that they and the rest of the world have come, for the moment and to a degree, for certain purposes and in certain contexts, to view them as contrastive to what is around them.
King situates religious and ethnic identity as contextual, contrastive, and negotiated constructions rather than natural kinds, contributing a social-constructivist perspective that complements depth-psychological accounts.
Hume does not yet take this step and suggests that the unity of personality can be assimilated to that of a republic or a commonwealth whose members unceasingly change but whose ties of association remain.
Ricoeur traces Hume's associationist analogy for personal identity — unity as commonwealth rather than substance — as a step toward the full dissolution of sameness-based selfhood that Nietzsche and later thinkers would complete.