Notes on Marcia's Identity states

These course notes on Adolescent Identity provide a bit more information on James Marcia's states of identity formation: foreclosure, diffusion, moratorium, achieved. The way I understand it now, these are states that all adolescents experience. The notes insist these should not be seen as stages one passes through in sequence. In my notes, I have presented them in a simple table:

	(active engagement w/ identity formation)	(passive engagement)
(stable)	achieved	foreclosed
(unstable)	moratorium	diffused

We see that the active states of achieved and moratorium are the states where the identity crisis has been engaged and grappled with, one successfully, the passive ones (foreclosed and diffused) have avoided the agon. You can also look at it from the perspective of stability, or continuity of self. The achieved and foreclosed states exist as steady states of self consciousness, the former being a realized individuality, the latter a kind of prefab conformity. The diffused and moratorium states are unsettled. The diffused personality fails to commit and thus remains indeterminate. The moratorium fails to succeed in commiting though their identity formation is "in progress." Not suprisingly, I'm not the first to arrange the states in a table like this. An expanded version of this table with additional notes can be found atpbu.edu. As I've introduced these ideas in class, I've wondered how many of us are truly identity achieved. My hunch would be that most Americans have foreclosed identities, meddled with by their parents and churches, perhaps primarily influenced by the mass media. Next in my ranking would come the identity-diffused. Conflict and crisis must be avoided, development arrested, personality kept in a bubble of youthful immaturity and ennui. Less popular would be the moratorium group, those who realize there's a struggle to be taken up, who experience the anxiety and uncertainty of that struggle, and who try on various identities as they work their way towards self-integration. Fewest of all would be those who successfully achieved identity. They are true individuals, individuals who know how to commit, how to relate with others, who are deep and rounded, and who have in a way heroically passed through the crisis stage. A fellow by the name of Dimitrios Jason Stalides has synthesized Erikson and Marcia with Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" monomyth (and plenty of screengrabs from Star Wars). He calls it Hero psychology. By way of review, Joseph Campbell's hero journey can be reduced to three basic stages: separation, initiation, return. Stalides's monomyth page drills into further sub stages. What's interesting about this to me is how the Campbell hook gives me a way to pull in literature and literary character analysis into the discussion. Identity formation is interpreted as a narrative of self exploration, as the hero's journey, as a coming of age. Even without introducing Campbell into the discussion, one can examine literary personas and map them into Marcia's quadrants. For example, James Joyce's story "Eveline" shows us a woman who moves from moratorium to foreclosure. Tragically so. Sammy in "A&P" moves from passive engagement to active, probably entering into a moratorium state (and depending on how you read the story, ultimately an achieved state). The persona in Wordsworth's Intimation Ode moves from moratorium to achieved. You get the idea: the story moves a character between states, and a poem might express the sense of being inside one of the states. Think of the foreclosure inside Auden's Unknown Citizen, for example. And then there may be texts that explore the idea that personas might be blind to their true identity. They think they're individuals, but they're not. Conrad's Lord Jim comes to mind. At least this gives me some leads to pursue later.