IDENTITY: The dance of our Substitute Identities and the trap of Identification

Identity is a “hot topic" in academia and popular culture. It might be considered as the ideological signifier of our age, but also carries an ever increasing weight as a political emblem, even as this mostly concerns identification, which we easily trade for consciousness. Identity is an essential attribute of being. At a personal level, identity is not only what we think we are or the labels we are given. It includes our unconscious and is more than our personality, the expression of our identity in relation to others. It goes deeper than our subjective selfhood, the notion of me or self which provides the sense of sameness and continuity, but this stability is an illusion. We are not the same all the time, the continuity of a single ‘self’ is a chimera. This is thus also true for our personality, One of the central themes of this book is that our personal identity is not an indivisible, immutable, totally consistent given, but rather a dynamic matrix, often a repertoire of identities. This is not a pathological condition, but something many of us have, with resulting inner conflicts, which eventually may cause depression or disease. To help understand these identity conflicts, in oneself and in others, we present a new way to look at the formation and development of identity and substitute identities and how these manifest and change. Dissociation and identification are processes of transformation, they shape us, a continuous process. Issues like the group mind, social identity, the Western identity crisis, identity politics, radicalization and identification mechanisms are covered in this book, as are PTSD and auto-immune diseases. We show how there is resonance between cell-, organ- and personal-identity at the epigenetic level. This book is full of new and daring insights and visualizations on how our psyche operates and how we as humans function.