Social Symptoms of Identity Needs

Social Symptoms of Identity Needsexplains how our major social problems, including crime, violence, terrorism, war, substance abuse and prejudice, are the result of efforts by their perpetrators to maintain a secure identity, or sense of self. It demonstrates, further, how our ineffective and counterproductive responses to these problems'including the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, and the War on Terrorism'are themselves the result of the fact that we don't really want to solve them, because they serve as means for us, the general public, to maintain our own identities. The book locates the root causes of these social problems and counterproductive responses in certain identity-damaging social and cultural phenomena that force identity to defend and maintain itself by socially harmful means. It concludes by explaining social and cultural interventions that can prevent the social problems by preventing, repairing, or compensating for the identity problems that give rise to them. -Provides a more comprehensive model of identity than those currently found in psychology, sociology, or psychoanalysis -Demonstrates that identity maintenance is the common motive underlying diverse social problems as well as our (deliberate) failure to solve them -Offers strategies of identity development for solving social problems and formulates interventions for implementing these strategies

Mark Bracher is Professor of the Department of English, and Director of the Center for Literature and Psychoanalysis, Kent State University, Ohio.