Sarcophagus of Identity: Tribalism, Nationalism, and the Transcendence of the Self by James M. Skelly

Author:James M. Skelly [Skelly, James M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Peace, Political Science
ISBN: 9783838269887
Google: xyPADgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35041842
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Published: 2017-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Identity Crises

The identity crises that Giddens, Goffman, Berger and company, and others have detailed should be considered in psychohistorical context, and for that we turn to the work of Erik Erikson. Erikson's analysis of Luther's identity crisis (1993a), and its problematic personal resolution, provides us with a psychological template for the confusions of contemporary identity. Erikson also hinted at ways we might conceive of conceptually and concretely transcending the various prisons humans find themselves incarcerated in, from those that are "maximum security," to those which might be characterized as akin to an "open prison." Erikson enriched that template by analysing the identity crises of men as diverse as Darwin (1993a), Freud (1993a), Gandhi (1993b), Hitler (1993a), William James (1994), and George Bernard Shaw (1993a; 1994). For our purposes, Erikson's discussion of Shaw, James, Hitler, Gandhi, as well as Luther are most productive of the insights we want to emphasize.

Late in his life, Shaw had cause to reflect on his youth and, as Erikson noted, described "his crisis clearly and unsparingly," and leaves no "doubt about the true abyss which he faced." In his youth, although events in Shaw's life "were coming to a head,…he felt that he was being lived by them, rather than living them." While working as a clerk at the age of 20, for example, Erikson quotes Shaw's reminiscence that, "Business, instead of expelling me for the worthless imposter I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting me go." So instead, Shaw "broke loose," which meant leaving "family and friends, business and Ireland… to avoid the danger of success without identity…." As Erikson notes, individuals like Shaw "build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden" (1993a: 44–45).

Shaw ultimately became 'Shaw,' or 'GBS,' when he accepted that, in his own words, he was "a born Communist," and thus his feeling that, somewhat like Edward Said, he had throughout his life suffered from:

"…a deeper strangeness which has made me all my life a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it. Whether it was that I was born mad, or a little too sane, my kingdom was not of this world: I was at home only in the realm of my imagination, and at my ease only with the mighty dead. Therefore, I had to become an actor, and create for myself a fantastic personality fit and apt for dealing with men, and adaptable to the various parts I had to play as author, journalist, orator, politician, committee man, man of the world, and so forth." (Quoted in Erikson, 1994: 149)

Shaw, like William James, suffered from what Erikson characterized as "identity confusion" (Ibid. 131), which he illustrates by accepting "Biff's formulation in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: "I just can't take hold, Mom, I can't take hold of some kind of a life" (Ibid.

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