Identity: Youth and Crisis.

Abstract

Erik H. Erikson is a psychoanalyst and an anthropologist of international stature. His works have served, over the past decades, as some of the best examples of scholarly and clinical work which linked individual psychological maturation and development with social process. His concept of modal adaptive tasks at phase specific stages of life has not only been proved as a process analysis of normal behavior but allows a cross-sectional analysis throughout life. Among his more original concepts is the description of the process which he called ego-identity. Ego identity is Erikson's attempt to link the internal psychological make-up of the individual with the environment which is social reality. Since identity, according to Erikson, is formed during adolescence and consolidated at the end of adolescence, much of his writings on the subject of identity concerns youth. The purpose of the book,Identity: Youth and Crisis, is to demonstrate