Erik Erikson was the theorist who highlighted the challenge of transforming our childhood self into the person we will be as adults. Recall he called this process the search for identity (see Table 10.3).

Time spent wandering through Europe to find himself sensitized Erikson to the difficulties young people face in constructing an adult self. Erikson’s fascination with identity as a developmental task, however, crystallized when he worked as a psychotherapist in a psychiatric hospital for troubled teens. Erikson discovered that young patients suffered from a problem he labeled role confusion. They had no sense of any adult path:

[The person feels as] if he were moving in molasses. It is hard for him to go to bed and face the transition into . . . sleep; and it is equally hard for him to get up . . . Such complaints as . . . “I don’t know” . . . “I give up” . . . “I quit” . . . are often expressions of . . . despair.

(Erikson, 1968, p. 169)

Some young people felt a frightening sense of falseness about themselves: “If I tell a girl I like her, if I make a gesture . . . this third voice is at me all the time—‘You’re doing this for effect; you’re a phony’” (quoted in Erikson, 1968, p. 173). Others could not cope with having any future and planned to end their lives on their eighteenth birthday or some other symbolic date.

This derailment, which Erikson called confusion—an aimless drifting, or shutting down—differs from the active search process he labeled moratorium (1980). Taking time to explore various paths, Erikson argued, is crucial to forming a solid adult identity. Having witnessed Hitler’s Holocaust, Erikson believed that young people must discover their own identities. He had seen a destructive process of identity formation firsthand. To cope with that nation’s economic problems after World War I, German teenagers leaped into pathological identities by entering totalitarian organizations such as the Hitler Youth.

Can we categorize the different ways people tackle the challenge of constructing an adult identity? Decades ago, James Marcia answered yes.

Marcia (1966, 1987) devised four identity statuses to expand on Erikson’s powerful ideas:

Marcia’s categories offer a marvelous framework for pinpointing what is going wrong (or right) in a young person’s life. Perhaps while reading these descriptions you were thinking, “I have a friend in diffusion. Now, I understand exactly what this person’s problem is!” How do these statuses really play out in life?

Marcia originally believed that, as we move through adolescence, we pass from diffusion to moratorium to achievement. Who thinks much about adulthood in ninth or tenth grade? At that age, your agenda is to cope with puberty. You test the limits. You sometimes act in ways that seem tailor-made to undermine your adult life (see Chapter 9). Then, as older adolescents and emerging adults, we undertake a moratorium search as adulthood looms in full view. At some point during our twenties, we have reached achievement, finalizing our search for an adult identity.

However, in real life, identity pathways are erratic. People move backward and forward in statuses throughout their adult years (Côté & Bynner, 2008; Waterman, 1999). A woman might enter college exploring different faiths, then become a committed Catholic, start questioning her choice again at 30, and finally settle on her spiritual identity in Bahai at age 45. As many older students are aware, you may have gone through moratorium and firmly believed you were in identity achievement in your career, and now have shifted back to moratorium when you realized, “I need a more secure, fulfilling job.”

This lifelong shifting is appropriate. It’s unrealistic to think we reach a final identity as emerging adults. The push to rethink our lives, to change directions, to have plans and goals, is what makes us human. It is essential at any age. Moreover, revising our identity is vital to living fully since our lives are always being disrupted—as we change careers, become parents, are widowed, or adapt to our children leaving the nest (McAdams, 2001b, 2013).

The bad news is that people can be stuck in unproductive places in their identity search. In some studies, an alarming 1 in 4 undergraduates is locked in diffusion (Côté & Bynner, 2008). They don’t have any career goals. Or, as I see in my classes, students are sampling different paths, but without much Eriksonian moratorium joy. Is your friend who keeps changing his major and putting off graduation excitedly exploring his options, or is he afraid of entering the real world? Are the emerging adults who spend their twenties moving from low-wage job to low-wage job really in moratorium or randomly drifting into adult life?

Actually, Erikson and Marcia’s assumption that we need to sample many fields in order to construct a solid career identity, is not accurate. Having a career goal in mind from childhood, such as knowing you want to be a nurse from age nine (the status Marcia dismisses as “foreclosure”) is fine (Ryeng, Kroger, & Martinussen, 2013). Anxiously obsessing about possibilities, or being locked in a state called ruminative moratorium, causes more distress (Ritchie and others, 2013; Luyckx and others, 2014). (“I don’t know if I want to be an anesthesiologist or an actor and that’s driving me crazy.”)

There can even be problems with being identity achieved. Suppose after considerable searching you adopt a devalued identity. (“Yes, I’ll give up and go to medical school, but I’m not convinced being a doctor is really me.”) It doesn’t matter how you got there. What’s crucial is to make a commitment and feel confident that this decision expresses your true self (see Meeus, 2011; Schwartz and others, 2013 for reviews).

The emotional pluses of committing to our identity and feeling positive about that choice are underlined by examining ethnic identity—our sense of belonging to an ethnic category, such as “Asian American.” If, like me, you are part of the mainstream culture, you rarely think of your ethnicity. For minority young people, labeling yourself as part of a group, with defined characteristics, tends to happen during concrete operations (recall Chapter 6), although the need to explore one’s relationship to that label waxes and wanes at older ages. For instance, although ethnic identity issues often become intense during the teens, one study showed that in college, people grapple with that consciousness again (Syed & Azmitia, 2009).

People cope with this consciousness in various ways. They may develop dual minority and mainstream identities (acting African American in one setting and not another), or reject one identity in favor of another (“I never think of myself as Black, just as American,” or “I never think of myself as American, just as Black”) (Phinney, 2006).

Studies routinely show that identifying with one’s ethnicity is correlated with a host of positive attributes and traits (Acevedo-Polakovich and others, 2014; Kiang, Witkow, & Champagne, 2013). Being proud of one’s heritage as an African American or Asian American buffers young people from becoming depressed or resorting to risk taking when faced with discrimination in the wider world (Polanco-Roman & Miranda, 2013; Toomey and others, 2013). But, it’s important to reach out to the wider culture, too. Actually, firmly connecting with the mainstream culture (“I’m also proud of being American”) is one sign that an ethnic minority young person has the skills to reach out fully in love.

The challenges for biracial or multiracial emerging adults, people from mixed racial or ethnic backgrounds (like President Obama), are particularly poignant. These young people may feel adrift without any ethnic home (Literte, 2010). But, here, too, reaching identity achievement can have widespread benefits. Fascinating research suggests having a biracial or bicultural background pushes people to think in more creative, complex ways about life (Tadmor, Tetlock, & Peng, 2009). It can promote resilience, too. As one biracial woman in her early thirties put it: “When I was younger I felt I didn’t belong anywhere. But now I’ve just come to the conclusion that my home is inside myself” (Phinney, 2006, p. 128).

Making sense of one’s “place in the world” as an ethnic minority is literally a minority identity theme. But every young person has to grapple with those two universal identity issues: choosing a career and finding love. The rest of this chapter tackles those agendas.

Question 10.5

Question 10.6

Question 10.7

Question 10.8