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Identity: An International
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Symbolic Interactionist
Reflections on Erikson,
Identity, and Postmodernism
Andrew J. Weigert & Viktor Gecas
Published online: 12 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Andrew J. Weigert & Viktor Gecas (2005) Symbolic Interactionist
Reflections on Erikson, Identity, and Postmodernism, Identity: An International
Journal of Theory and Research, 5:2, 161-174, DOI: 10.1207/s1532706xid0502_5

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 IDENTITY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY AND RESEARCH, 5(2), 161–174
Copyright © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Symbolic Interactionist Reflections

on Erikson, Identity, and Postmodernism
Andrew J. Weigert
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Department of Sociology
University of Notre Dame

Viktor Gecas
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Purdue University

Erikson theorized about identities as both typified epigenetic outcomes and adapta-
tions to cultural–historical circumstances. Neo-Eriksonians have emphasized the
former, with a more narrow focus on the identity struggles of adolescents.
Postmodern theorists have strongly emphasized the latter. Reflecting a postmodern
perspective, Rattansi and Phoenix (1997) emphasized the ephemeral and manipu-
lated aspects of contemporary identity dynamics that diminish self and weaken
core self-understandings. We argue for a symbolic interactionist perspective that
incorporates both perspectives on identity within a theoretical scope that posits
selves as embodied agents struggling for meaningful identities by adapting to their
social and physical environments and sometimes working to change these environ-
ments through individual and collective action.

Erikson’s seminal discussion of identity emphasized three aspects that are both in-
dividual and social: sameness, uniqueness, and difference. He posited identity as
embodied: an epigenetic process through which a person’s biography unfolds from
within according to a “ground plan” in ordered stages and sequences (Erikson,
1968, p. 92). He codified developmental aspects of biography in a typology of
stages, each characterized by personal adjustment to, and more or less fulfillment
of, a universal challenge to attain or retain a basic good, a challenge that combines
bodily aging and social status passages. Passage through these stages defines a per-

Requests for reprints should be sent to Andrew J. Weigert, Department of Sociology, University of
Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556. E-mail: aweigert@nd.edu
 162 WEIGERT

son’s identities and state of healthy functioning—that is, it portrays the “problem
of ego identity,” a major focus of the adolescent stage (Erikson, 1959).
Erikson insists at the same time that biography is both socially and historically
influenced and shaped from without through “ego development and historical
change” (Erikson, 1959, p. vii). His own life was a process of adjustments to
changing familial, societal, and historical dynamics as he moved from one conti-
nent to another and included a name change in his identity transformations. He in-
corporated cultural and historical contexts of identity transitions in recognition of
the loss of a meaningful male identity of “buffalo hunter” in the resettlement of
Sioux Native Americans with the imposition of European social structures. Later
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studies of exemplary individuals generated syntheses of individual development

and historical contexts into a person’s meaning in history, or “psychohistory.”
Erikson’s early work framed the continual tension between individual biography
and sociocultural context in a typology of developmental stages and emphasis on
historical context. Understanding identity formation involves continual struggle
with this tension.
Erikson’s seminal statements are continuous with three neo-Eriksonian sub-
currents: a positivistic articulation of the intrapsychic epigenetic typology, as in
identity status research (Marcia, 1993); a sociologically informed reclamation of
the interplay between intrapsychic unfolding and extrapsychic social and his-
torical factors (Côté & Levine, 2002); and a critique from postmodernist and
emancipatory theorizing such as feminism, which posits the reformation of society
as part of healthy identity development (Rattansi & Phoenix, 1997; Sorell & Mont-
gomery, 2003).

SO, WHAT IS CRITIQUED IN ERIKSONIAN THEORY?

Rattansi and Phoenix (this issue) argue against what they see as “the Eriksonian in-
dividualistic theorisation of identity” (p. 106), and they submit that the identity sta-
tus approach creates an “individual–society dichotomy” that “runs counter to at-
tempts to understand identities as more fluid and fragmented” (p. 101). In general,
they contend that conventional approaches have “frequently resulted either in the
individualisation and decontextualisation of young people’s identities, tended to
omit their subjectivities, or has failed to grasp the multiplicity, fluidity and con-
text-dependent operation of youth identities and identifications” (p. 98).
In brief, Ratansi and Phoenix (this issue) call for conceptual frameworks and
theorizing that explicitly recognize “intersections of the local/global” (p. 118) as
central to identity formation. Taking account of these intersections results in a
“de-centreing” and “de-essentialisation” of identities that are continually trans-
formed through relationships and redefined through sociohistorical definitions of
what it means to be a person (p. 103). Finally, they claim that such decentering and
 A SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST VIEW 163

de-essentialization are “inimical to the idea of a ‘core self’ that is … an essential

organiser of the subject’s relations with the social world” (p. 104). They emphasize
the multiple and sometimes contradictory identities that participants carry. The
theoretical task then calls for ever-reformable interdisciplinary analyses and theo-
rizing (p. 119). Indeed, interdisciplinary communication, shared theorizing, com-
parative evaluation, and syntheses or convergences are facilitated through mutual
translations of categories and models.
Their critique appears to focus on uses of Erikson’s typology as a universally
applicable theoretical scheme without the contextualizing effects and tensions of
history and culture that inform his early theorizing. We suggest that the critique ap-
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plies to reductionist applications of Erikson’s developmental typology that restrict

the problem of ego identity to stages of epigenetic unfolding. With its wide scope
and cross-disciplinary openings, Erikson’s larger schema suggests both substan-
tive theorizing and systematic theoretical comparisons for understanding identity
formation and dynamics, especially in the context of broadly understood post-
modernist emphases. We sketch a symbolic interactionist perspective toward both
Eriksonian and postmodernist versions of identity theorizing and suggest that it
addresses both perspectives and lends itself to theory construction, comparative
evaluation, and perhaps convergence.

IMPORTANCE OF DISTINGUISHING
SELF AND IDENTITY

The concepts of “self” and “identity” are distinct, closely linked, and often con-
flated. Distinguishing the two concepts is a needed first step. For us, self refers to a
substantive social referent for the reflexive process of being self-aware and
self-acting. As such, it is a central organizing concept within symbolic inter-
actionism (Blumer, 1969, p. 21). Following Mead, self follows from societal dy-
namics; it is intrinsically social. Indeed, it is a “social self,” which, in shorthand, is
referenced simply as “self.” Unfortunately, this shorthand often suppresses the un-
derstanding that self is social before it is individual. Once self emerges, it exercises
“agency in which self is aware of self as acting” (Weigert & Gecas, 2003, p. 268).
Self-awareness follows from the reflexivity and emergence that are axioms under-
lying a symbolic interactionist theory of presence, motivation, and reconstructive
action (Callero, 2003). Identity, by contrast, refers to “typifications of self as … de-
fined by self or other, and often the focus of conflict, struggle, and politics”
(Weigert & Gecas, 2003, p. 268). In short, identities are nouns; selves are gerunds.
We recognize that personal awareness and embedded experience include much
more in definitions of self than that which is conceptually or perceptually avail-
able. Mead emphasized that all meanings and objects-as-known are social prod-
ucts. Self-as-known—that is, as identified—is a constructed object. Socio-
 164 WEIGERT

logically, identities, by contrast with self, are totally social objects, but they have
unique characteristics through their relationships with self.
Identities are objects referenced to an embodied self that both knows itself con-
ceptually and perceives itself imagistically. Self is concomitantly aware of itself
and feels itself as substantively more than what others know or see (Weigert,
1975). Finally, in contemporary society, each identity is situated within experience
as one of many identities that make political and psychological claims on aware-
ness and emotions. Identity pluralism and identity politics characterize contempo-
rary society. Identities, as competing social definitions functioning in personified
narratives, refer not only to individual meanings, but also to collectively or
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mythically embodied entities as well, such as deities, corporations, ethnic groups,

or nations. The discussion presented here focuses on identities of embodied selves
and not on those carried by social or collective entities.
Embodiment, in the sense of having an organically grounded presence, renders
identity a special category of social object. The organic body is socially trans-
formed into appearances interpreted as linked to core identities, such as gender,
race, ethnicity, beauty, age, healthiness, and so forth. In addition, the body anchors
a self’s memories and emotions—two trans-situational dimensions of identity pre-
sentation—imposition, and validation. To remember, accept, present, reject, or
lose an identity has bodily as well as psychological and social outcomes for self. A
theoretical perspective that omits embodiment from interpretations of identity is,
to that extent, inadequate. We suggest that some Eriksonian and postmodern think-
ers tend to reduce body to one of its social psychological functions, such as bio-
graphical identities that are inadequately social or media images that are too
ephemeral for self-continuity.
Interactionists recognize that embodiment of identities generates a range of
identity adherence, sameness, or “stickiness,” as it were, over the life course. Iden-
tities anchored in the body are relatively more stable trans-situationally and within
situations. Today’s multiaudience social worlds and medical technologies, how-
ever, enable bodily changes from sex to beauty in “extreme makeovers.” What
were relatively trans-situational embodied identities become, for those with re-
sources, another commodified identity for sale in markets of fashions, cosmetics,
surgeries, and therapies.
Embodied identities require interactional work to present and validate them
across structural arrangements and cultural meanings. Analysts typically distin-
guish personal, situational, and contextual or institutional levels of identity forma-
tion and validation (Vryan, Adler, & Adler, 2003). Identities, as socially structured,
are prior media through which members over their life times internalize social loca-
tions, tasks, and values for their individual good or ill. Each situation and context re-
quires empirical analysis. Such analyses suggest generalized life stages based (at
least up until our historical period) on the birth, development, and death of individu-
als as well as on continual change in identities over the life course.
 A SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST VIEW 165

The universality of aging grounds the validity of a developmental perspective

on identity formation. Meanings of aging are socially and culturally structured, de-
fined, and reconstructed, and some day may be medically or technologically re-
configured in ways yet unknown (Joy, 2000). Nevertheless, until an individual is
born, cloned, or biomolecularly replicated as a full blown adult with built in age-
lessness, individuals’ identities will continue to develop as a result of aging.

SOME INTERACTIONIST AND POSTMODERNIST

DIFFERENCES AND CONVERGENCES
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Symbolic interactionists and postmodernists differ significantly in their perspec-

tives on self: Social self is a grounding substantive concept for interactionists; it is
a misleading concept for postmodernists for whom the participant tends to disap-
pear. Interactionists like Blumer insisted that self is an ever-emerging source of
meaning of and for the individual and thus a wellspring of continuous theorizing
about humans (Blumer, 1969, p. 21).
A “processual” symbolic interactionist perspective is close to postmodernist
approaches in that it takes self as referring to contingent situational meanings, not
to continuous self-sameness. Yet, we emphasize that we take social self as a special
category of meaning anchored in embodiment, awareness, and reflexivity (Weigert
& Gecas, 2003) as well as social structures and institutional contexts (Vryan et al.,
2003). Nevertheless, interactionists who emphasize the situational contingency of
self are close to the postmodernist emphasis on decentered and fragmented sets of
identities as characteristic of contemporary societies (cf. typologies in Côté,
2000).
“Structural” symbolic interactionists (e.g., Stryker, 1980), on the other hand,
are more likely to focus on contexts and situations within contexts in which the pa-
rameters of identity are more institutionalized and stable. (Even the authors differ
on the relative emphasis each places on process and subjectivity or structure and
objectivity.) These foci allow them to pursue controlled survey and experimental
studies on identity work. Their results show a certain predictability within struc-
tured contexts—a situated finding that, combined with processual interactionists’
emphases, suggest the interwoven dynamics of identity work that goes beyond
both an Eriksonian sameness of the ego as synthesizer and executor and the
self-less fragments of the postmodern actor.
In the ninth edition of his social psychology text, Hewitt (2003, pp. 25–28)
noted the tension between symbolic interaction and postmodern approaches. He
found similarities in the processual, reflexive, and narrative components of self as
experience and a distinct difference in the postmodern reduction of self to a gram-
matical “subject.” Sandstrom and Fine (2003, p. 1050ff) echoed these compari-
sons. They described postmodernity as “a multidimensional term that describes …
 166 WEIGERT

advanced capitalist countries” (p. 1050) characterized by rapid social change.

Echoing Rattansi and Phoenix (1997), they saw contemporary societies as “con-
sumption-oriented,” with growing “information technologies and culture indus-
tries, the commodification of images, the diversification of social worlds, the
de-centering of selves, and the crumbling of previously dominant modernist val-
ues” (Sandstrom & Fine, 2003, p. 1050). These features generate a sense that the
“world had fundamentally and unalterably changed” (p. 1050) and indeed contin-
ues to change in unpredictable ways.
We assume that all theorists recognize rapid social change as a constitutive
dynamic of contemporary societies. Analyzing emergent, contingent, and pro-
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cessual social contexts, postmodernists “share interactionism’s (and pragma-

tism’s) suspicion of positivism and scientism, emphasizing that all social science is
value-laden” (Sandstrom & Fine, 2003, p. 1050). Sandstrom and Fine also sug-
gested that interactionists and postmodernists share “emphasis on interpretative
scholarship” and “make language and information technology central” (p. 1051).
Furthermore, postmodernists potentially enrich interactionist theory with con-
structs such as multivocality, “dying of the social,” saturation of self, and so forth.
Scientific constructs and theorizing are necessarily ever reformable if they are to
be adequate for understanding rapidly changing social environments.
Finally, postmodern analysis finds that “identities have become fragmented and
incoherent” (Sandstrom & Fine, 2003, p. 1051) in part because self ceases to func-
tion. Sustaining structures and institutional anchorages, such as family, no longer
support stability of experiences for a continuous self (see Côté, 2000, chap. 5). And
interactionists and postmodernists emphasize the increasing power of institutions
and their logics to define experience and impose identities on self. Thus, in contrast
with an Eriksonian developmental and normative approach, no identities can be ex-
perienced as unified, self-same, and continuous because self—the active center of
identities—is no longer institutionally supported as such.
At its worst, the postmodern condition allows powerful manipulators to im-
pose identities on the powerless that serve the interests of the powerful. The im-
posed identities are clothed in convincing symbolism that ironically persuades
the powerless to accept the imposed identities as natural and in their, the power-
less, best interests. Thus, we come full circle to Marx’s “false consciousness,”
which prevents the powerless from analyzing their handicapped circumstances,
and Sartre’s “bad faith,” which exempts the powerful from evaluating their privi-
leged circumstances.
Symbolic interactionists may formulate a “rapprochement between … pragma-
tism and postmodernism … that would merge interactionist theory with the pursuit
of more just and democratic social practices” with a view to “the power of sym-
bolic creation” (Sandstrom & Fine, 2003, pp. 1052–1053). In our view, that power
lies within the reflexive awareness of self struggling for authenticity, effica-
ciousness, and esteem through whatever identities are socially available.
 A SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST VIEW 167

On the other hand, Eriksonian theorizing may approach rapprochement with

symbolic interactionism by its insistence on the centrality of embodiment that
grounds motives, emotions, generativity, aging, illness, and death—aspects con-
sistent with a pragmatic agenda for self seeking ever more inclusive and authen-
tic identities. In addition, normative aspects informing Eriksonian analyses high-
light the intrinsic effects of values and indirect effects of value-linked concepts
of identity that theorists find in biographical narratives. Theoretical components
sometimes inform culture and enter the consciousness of contemporaries strug-
gling to make sense out of their lives, as Freudian, Skinnerian, rational ex-
change, and media consumerist narratives have been internalized by selves
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(Denzin, 2003).
Postmodernists sometimes speak of self as “erased.” Thus, identities anchored
in relatively permanent self-concepts are replaced with ephemeral self-images or
free-floating signifiers that leave the individual with no referential anchor for
knowing self. Selves who experience themselves only through fleeting and
free-floating images become restless seekers of temporary meaning through situa-
tional self-presentations, not integral biographers of life-long meanings.
An “erased” self cannot integrate identities, support a core identity, or justify
continuous commitment. An erased self annihilates an Eriksonian ego identity and
eliminates a foundation of symbolic interactionist theorizing. Contemporaries
who do not believe in a centering self may experience only disjointed bodily states
known through identity fragments. Powerful identity mongerers then fill the
erased experiential slate with manipulated and commodified images of “self.”
Contemporaries who seek self-authenticity, then, strive to maintain an authentic
personal identity, often in the absence of supporting stable institutional identities.
They seek authenticity through situational identities, however, that are mostly cul-
turally constructed by and dependent on powerful others (Vryan et al., 2003, p.
370). Paradoxically, the dynamics of complex societies both demand and threaten
self-authenticity (Côté, 2000, spoke of default and developmental individualiza-
tion).
Callero (2003) presented corroborative evaluations and comparisons from his
symbolic interactionist perspective. He organized a sociological approach to self
around power, reflexivity, and social constructionism. Power ties individuals to
both the opportunities and the constraints of life chances structured into prior strat-
ification systems. Institutionalized life chances link with cultural definitions of
persons as agents or pawns. These empowering or oppressing self-definitions are
distributed along with the power, prestige, and wealth that constitute the stratifica-
tion system.
Reflexivity links identity to the capacity of individuals to be concomitantly
aware of self in action and to recognize that they experience the thoughts, emo-
tions, and strivings that they are enacting. Reflexivity grounds authenticity and in-
oculates against alienation. Without an aware self who organizes, no matter how
 168 WEIGERT

fitfully or despairingly, the identities presented in a situation, those identities be-

come nothing more than alienated meanings imposed by others or gossamer expe-
riences that dissipate like ceremonial selves once the ritual is over. The tension be-
tween reflexive experiences of self as agent or pawn and the pluralism,
contingency, and stress of identity work is a characteristic of today’s world and an
indication that self continues to struggle.
Finally, social constructionism refers to both the fact of social and cultural dif-
ferences in identities historically and geographically and methods of narrating and
enacting sociocultural–historical locations of identity formation in one’s own bi-
ography. That is, analogous to “self-reflexivity,” there is a second or “cultural re-
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flectivity” that refers to self-definitions reflected back from culturally mirrored

meanings. Selves then internalize these identities whether they intend it or not.
Cultural reflections mirror structures of social power within self-awareness: So-
cialization is acculturation into the identity stratification system.
A coda on a symbolic interactionist perspective on identity engages analysts in
a pragmatic approach to communicate about identity with those whose identities
are under interpretation. We think that the philosophical perspective of symbolic
interactionism retains Mead’s social meliorative and personal agency perspectives.
Existentialist symbolic interactionists insist that a continual struggle to reconstruct
self and society is part of a progressive project toward emerging forms of social
life. This follows from Mead’s commitment to values as motives that portray more
progressive futures. Projected futures as part of self-understandings are implicated
in all theorizing and should be a self-conscious component of scholars’ choices of
metaphors, models, and interpretive schema (e.g., Shalin, 1991).

SELF, EMBODIMENT, AND IDENTITY

As mentioned, self-as-known becomes at once a social and personal meaning that

is paradoxically like all other constructed social objects but with the distinguishing
feature of embodiment that grounds awareness and reflexivity. These features al-
low self, at times, to be an efficacious agent of its self-as-known, that is, as a claims
maker of its own identities.
We briefly touch on several core aspects of self-identification that flow from the
phenomenological reality of embodiment—namely, emotions, race, and gender.
The first refers to self-feelings that are then defined and become culturally known
and personally experienced as emotions. Although too long overlooked in socio-
logical analyses, emotions are central to self. Through emotions, “we produce the
embodied foundation for selfhood” (Franks, 2003, p. 803). Phenomenologically
speaking, Franks noted that, as corporeal, emotions are “preobjective” and yet they
are “social.” Analysts, therefore, are “challenged to go beyond not only linguistic
interaction but also self-reflection and awareness into the semiotics of our gestural
 A SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST VIEW 169

embodiment” (p. 803). Selves experientially known through embodied identities

become socialized as sentient actors who feel what they know.
A second aspect of embodiment central to identity formation is
body-as-appearance, primarily the master appearances of race and gender. Re-
cently in the United States, a new category of racial identity is receiving public at-
tention: mixed race identities. The definitional struggle arises at both bureaucratic
and personal levels and then to linkages between these levels. In brief, mixed race
ancestry and resultant appearances are being redefined into new personal, situa-
tional, and bureaucratic categories (Rockquemore, 1998). The debate includes dis-
cussion of categories such as “biracial” in the 2000 U.S. census. Analogous devel-
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opments with gender identities suggest that selves constantly struggle with the
identities available during their time on stage, even as the scripts and dramatis per-
sonae change. Sorell and Montgomery (2003, and accompanying responses) noted
that typologies of gender identity formation need to include value dimensions for
understanding self and dynamics for reconstructing society. Individuals are born
into societies with prescripted and structured biographies or life courses.

SELF-DEVELOPMENT AND THE LIFE COURSE

The concept of “life course” nuances an interactionist perspective on identity de-

velopment by comparison with epigenetic unfolding. Typically, analysts posit tra-
ditional societies as having stable rites of passage, structures of kin networks, and
predefined work/gender roles and statuses throughout members’ lifetimes.
Erikson’s early work on ego identity illuminated development in the near-recent
stages of modern society immediately after WWII and in transit from Europe to the
United States. Contemporary First, Second, Third, and even Fourth “world” soci-
eties, by contrast, are in different moments of deep transformation in threat, risk,
ideology, markets, and communication.
A postmodernist view interprets identity development as individuals traversing
a contingent life course that is fitted “into the diverse social practices … through
which they are constructed … (and) increasingly … given meaning in … socially
organized circumstances and institutions” (Holstein & Gubrium, 2003, p. 850).
This view may lose self in the social practices and discourses of powerful institu-
tions. Holstein and Gubrium, however, asserted that an “interactionist view of the
life course is not as morally pessimistic, allowing us to consider … lives as being
continually open to new formulations, resisting determinacy” (p. 850). Further-
more, they suggested that each “life can be … authentically reconstructed as it
passes through … interpretive domains” (pp. 850–851).
Selves continuously engage in the “biographical work” of telling, feeling, and
enacting the institutional scripts they have available. One of the most powerful
scripts concerns occupation, which is, for many, simply a job. As young contempo-
 170 WEIGERT

raries struggle to find jobs, income, and housing, life course scripts are being re-
written yet again by the constraints of employment. For example, a local paper
headline proclaims, “Many Americans now think 26 is age for being grown up”
(Irvine, 2003, p. C1). The author goes on to observe that 26-year-old Americans
may be living at home and waiting on tables in the evenings. A new life stage label
is recognized, “‘emerging adulthood’—the period between age 18 to 25” (p. C3),
and with it comes a new identity, “emerging adult.” Within an Eriksonian schema,
such an identity may be conceptualized as in “moratorium” or “arrested” (Côté,
2000; Marcia, 1993).
Working from a normative science perspective, Côté (2000) asserted that, when
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advocating the rejection of core selves in favor of embracing multiple personali-

ties, “the postmodern position regarding … changes affecting Western societies is
seriously flawed, if not reckless” (p. 196). He developed an “identity capital
model” (p. 208ff) for interpreting agency and potential in individualistic as well as
communal societies. He recognized the motivational import of positive futures by
emphasizing “intergenerational justice” as a defining value for “adult hu-
mans”—that is, caring, planning, and acting for the good of others and future gen-
erations. In effect, Côté moves from an a priori normative stance to a fu-
ture-oriented reconstructive stance to “reinstitutionalize” life’s stages. At that
point, the future is as open a value field as interactionists and postmodernists may
affirm. The way to that future is across an ambivalent range of optimism–pessi-
mism and freedom–determinism issues as critical as humans have ever faced, with
some hands on weapons of mass destruction and some souls seeking eternal certi-
tude (Weigert, 1991).

IDENTITY, AUTHENTICITY, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS:

A “SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTAL” SUGGESTION

Social movements and other forms of collective action are societal dynamics
through which selves struggle to reconstruct themselves, their societies, and their
futures. Images and ideas of preferable futures or values are central to the social
psychology of social movements as well as identity development. Gecas (2000)
posited that “value identities are embedded within collective identities as key ele-
ments” (p. 100) in social movements. Value identities are internally involved in
three core self-motives: esteem, efficacy, and authenticity.
Value identities refer to “general goals and end states (as) … the basis of …
authenticity,” and they emerge from the “cultural and moral context of
self-definitions, … within which concepts of justice and injustice take shape”
(Gecas, 2000, pp. 102–105). Within social movements, collective identities and
participants’ identities continue to adapt and shape each other. Melucci (1996) sug-
gested a neologism, “identization,” to “express this increasingly self-reflexive and
 A SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST VIEW 171

constructed manner in which contemporary collective actors tend to define them-

selves” (p. 77).
A symbolic interactionist approach to social movements builds on self-agency
in the context of interactional patterns and social constructions with an eye toward
emergence of new collective and individual identities. Social movement scholars
describe and assess the “transformative processes” that realign persons’ “cogni-
tion, perspective, and emotion” (Snow, 2003, p. 825). A powerful identity transfor-
mation, for example, is conversion to an ideological or religious identity through
participation in movements. Such studies highlight linkages between personal
identity and social identity as selves move from one group or issue to another and
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realign their identities or have new identities imposed on them. A self who moves
“from the balcony to the barricades” truly acquires a new identity. Even if a move-
ment fails to generate new societal patterns, effects on identity and emotions re-
main real outcomes of the struggle for new lives and new values (p. 826).
Our suggestions for theoretical concepts relevant to a humanistic and progres-
sive social self fall into two categories: a model of self-motives that includes
self-worth, self-esteem, and authenticity and an understanding that locates
self-as-project—that is, oriented to preferred and inclusivist but always contingent
futures—at the heart of self-understanding. Our emphasis on self as a crucial dy-
namic in identity formation and transformation, however, joins with a social realist
understanding of the always prior and likely outlasting effects of society.
Central to a symbolic interactionist tradition is a dialectic between self and so-
ciety. This understanding resonates from the adage that self and society are two
sides of the same coin and neither is or is understood apart from the other. Just as
reflexion is a defining dynamic in our understanding of self, so, too, is a social real-
ist and historical process of self-formation understood as reflection back from the
sociocultural situations and institutional contexts within which we live. This dual
self-reflexion and cultural reflection—the first experiential and the second cul-
tural—portrays the dynamic mutuality of self and society.
A reflexive, relational, and agentic self, then, acquires content and meanings by
internalizing, presenting, and occasionally fashioning identities that become the
social reality of self, perhaps of others, and occasionally of emerging institutional
arrangements. Identities ultimately derive from socially real sources such as sig-
nificant or reference others or reified cultural meanings mediated through commu-
nication channels as varied as landscapes, theories of identity development, and all
forms of media. The metaphors, images, and concepts that theorists, whether
Eriksonian, interactionist, or postmodern, present for self-understanding have pos-
sible and, at times, powerful consequences for identity formation. An Eriksonian
perspective focuses on empowering individuals to cope with their social environ-
ments, even as postmodernist analyses focus on the complexity, dynamism, and
consequences of those environments. Systemic social psychological and cultural
linkages continually define the self–society dialectic, and analysts continually
 172 WEIGERT

need to formulate empowering metaphors of self and relevant interpretive analyses

of society. And the tasks of both are enhanced through dialogue.

CONCLUSION

In brief, we take identities as central, life-long, and variable meanings of social

selves. In this sense, we emphasize identity formation throughout the life course.
Second, identity struggles are part of the dynamic of social reconstruction exem-
plified in social movements. Erikson’s epigenetic typology is derivative of his
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early recognition of both intra- and extrapsychic dynamics such as biological ag-
ing, history, and culture. Third, in contrast with the many meanings of “ego” that
we find—for example, structure, function, dynamic, synthesizer, executor, entity,
or actor—we posit a continuous substantival self as a reflexive, relational, and
agentic entity regardless of the social complexity, rate of change, or imagistic and
manipulative forces acting above and below self-awareness. Someone, we pro-
pose, is remembering, acting, and suffering through these dynamics.
In a word, we recognize Rattansi and Phoenix’s (1997) call to rehistoricize and
de-essentialize Eriksonian analyses of identity formation to better understand con-
temporary ever-emerging cohorts of youth who themselves go on aging. At the
same time, we would tell stories of selves struggling with challenging and
too-often demeaning circumstances around the globe. These recognitions recall
Erikson’s larger humanistic, personalized, and inclusive project in the midst of
ever-more powerful politicoeconomic societal dynamics. Whether or not theorists
intend to shape identities through the cognitive components of their theories, those
consequences remain causal and empirical livelihoods of narratives about self.
Decisions to depict self as a unique ego who unfolds epigenetically to follow
normative pathways from the past, as an erased myth replaced by a grammatical
subject refashioned from situation to situation, or as a social self that is both
situationally defined and trans-situationally remembered and enacted in pursuit of
preferred futures are value-sensitive theoretical choices. From a pragmatic per-
spective, theorists are responsible for recognizing potential linkages between theo-
ries and their cultural outcomes and, at times, making likely linkages explicit, at
least to one’s self. Theories of self and identity become part of ongoing cultural dy-
namics informing identity formation.
Erikson (1968) himself noted in a discussion of “Negro identity” that there are
movements toward what he referred to as “the wholeness of a more inclusive iden-
tity” (p. 314, italics in original). He observed at the time he was writing in the
mid-1960s that the struggle was occurring in many regions of the world. We see a
similarity with Mead’s (1934) earlier positing of an intrinsic dynamic toward a “to-
tal self” (pp. 388–389). Erikson suggested a variety of social dynamics leading to
more inclusive identities, including the utopian and potential universalism of reli-
 A SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST VIEW 173

gion that moves toward nonviolence and against what he presciently noted as
“weapons of annihilation” (p. 319).
Paradoxically, age-old fundamentalist religious identities may move into the
ego-space emptied by economic and political forces. In the United States and else-
where, fundamentalist religious groups resist a postmodern erasure of self. Indeed,
rather than erasing self, postmodernist dynamics may generate more certitudinous
centered and essentialist selves. Fundamentalist identity dynamics gone wrong
can, at times, legitimate violence and genocide (Straub, 2001). In recognizing the
need for identities to sustain inclusivist intergenerational justice, Eriksonians,
symbolic interactionists, and postmodernists may converge in the struggle to theo-
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rize for selves who are nonviolent, inclusive, and just.

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