The name is absent

- 34.

Where there is identity-diffusion there is
f

* a painfully heightened sense of isolation

* a feeling of disintegration of sense of inner
continuity and sameness

* an overall sense of being ashamed

* an inability to derive a sense of accomplishment
from any kind of activity

* a feeling that life is happening to the individual
rather than being lived on his initiative

* experiencing an engagement to others as loss of
identity

* a wishing that parents had been different

♦ a radically shortened time perspective

* a basic mistrust which leaves it to the world,
society and indeed psychiatry to prove (to the
person) that he does exist in a psycho-social
sense

* despair.

De Levita and Erikson agree that where there is an experience
of identity-diffusion, the orientation is towards deviance. That
is, where there is the threat of identity-diffusion, negative
identity is embraced as the only way of achieving ego-identity.

De Levita (1965:31) asserts that;

It is easier to derive a sense of identity from a
total identification with what one is least
supposed to be than to struggle for a feeling
of reality in acceptable roles which are
unobtainable with the (person’s) inner means.

Many a late adolescent would, if faced with
continuing identity-diffusion, rather be nobody
or somebody bad, or even dead - and this totally
and by free choice, than be not quite somebody.

It is posited also that many an Aborigine, would ”if faced
with continuing identity-diffusion, rather be nobody or somebody
bad, or even dead, than be not quite somebody”, and that, in
point of fact, it is this desire to cease being ’not quite somebody'
that is at the basis of their concern for structuring an Aboriginal
identity.

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