Separation and Changing Identity in Becoming a Mother

Abstract

‘Identity’ self-evidently involves both social and psychological processes. Yet it is difficult to put the two together in meaningful ways. Traditional definitions tend to emphasise identity in relation to group membership, thus conflating the individual and the social. Alternatively, identity is equated with an individual’s essential characteristics, loosing constituting effects of social processes. More recently, sociological or post-structural definitions have stressed identity’s ephemeral qualities, highlighting how it is when we are threatened with a ‘loss’ of or ‘crisis’ in identity that we become most conscious of it. ‘One speaks of identity when one is not sure where one belongs’ (Bauman, 1996, p. 19). Hall captures the non-unitary nature of identity in his definition: ‘the unstable point at which the “unspeakable stories of subjectivity” meet the narratives of history and of a culture’ (Hall, 1988, p. 440). This raises the question of how individuals achieve psychological continuity in conditions of historical and geographical disjuncture or social fragmentation.