The constitution of the “Self” is formed by the perception we have of our personal identity. It is the product of socialization. For interactionist sociologists of the 19th and 20th centuries like Erving Goffman, social interactions deliver individual identities and not the other way around. The value of identity is not inert. It is the continuity of a process. Each person’s identity work is done continuously throughout their individual trajectory. This journey is linked to the resources mobilized and the context.
The different experiences of each person cause this identity to vary. The French sociologist Claude Dubar characterizes two inseparable components of social identity. The image we create for ourselves is the “Identity for oneself.” The one we want to project and communicate to those around us is the “Identity for others.” It constantly conceptualizes itself in relation to the other in the exchange, while also being in relation to what others reflect back to us. In the field of research, in the humanities, philosophy embraces the questions raised by identity. The philosophical heritage is one of the oldest and a precursor of what we know today. For pre-Socratic philosophers like Heraclitus and Parmenides (6th and 5th centuries BC), identity was already a cornerstone of their meditations. During the Middle Ages, it allowed expressing conformity to the group.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, empiricists also studied this concept to pose the problem of personal identity. The unity of personal identity over time was conceptualized by the English philosopher John Locke. He concluded that an individual is an embodied self-consciousness capable of keeping previous phases of existence in mind. In the 19th century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel reached a completely different conclusion by shifting the question of identity into the field of social relations. Thus, identity then results from the reciprocal recognition of the Self and the other; it arises from a conflictual process where individual interactions, objective, and subjective social practices are constructed. In his neurological studies, Sigmund Freud identifies conflict as the foundation of identity. He introduced a breach in the human subject who had been defined by Descartes and then Kant. The 20th century became very enriching in the many scientific researches on the question of identity. Psychologists appropriated the concept by emphasizing the individual. The German psychoanalyst Erik Erikson is a major figure in the dissemination of the term identity. This led to a new interest in social sciences. He is one of the leading researchers of a theory of identity concept related to developmental psychology. His theory and research have helped many scientists after him. They continued his work.
The identity crisis strikes the United States at the dawn of the 1960s. This period is marked by the assertion of the African-American minority. This prompts renewed research to update the relationships maintained between an individual with others and society. The concept of identity becomes then inevitable and unavoidable. New departments studying minority identities within a country, a city, or a neighborhood emerge. The concept of identity becomes common for numerous scientific domains. Its expansion gains momentum in the 1970s and spreads worldwide. However, the interest is older. History has shown us that the diversification of communities across the world has repeatedly shaped the notion of identity in the field of social sciences. Erikson and G.H. Mead have a very close notion of identity and the Self, which deepened the concept of a duality in self-representation from W. James and particularly his idea of the distinction between the “I” and the “me.” Following these analyses, Mead offers a definition of identity based on the existing relationships between the mind, the Self, and society. He suggests the idea that the Self consists of a sociological component that is only an internalization of social roles and a more personal component. The interaction of the I and the Me forms a social Self. For the I is the subject and the Me is the Self as an object.
The communication between the Me and the I forms the Self from the perspective where this exchange is the transposition in the consciousness of a person that connects them to other interactions. According to Mead, a person creates their Self with the image they reflect to others. This does not depend on a personal approach but must be accepted by others. Therefore, according to Jean Caune, “the Self is conceived as an effect of the individual’s positioning in interaction situations.” The sociologist has experimentally proven that social identity has implications on intergroup processes.
