Identification and identity: Differentiating the conceptual terms

Abstract

The relevance of the problem of identity and identification is determined by the changes in sociocultural reality in the post-modern societies of the second half of the 20th century, the crisis in the existential approach to personality studies, enhanced integrative trends in scientific thinking, its humanitarianization and anthropocentric nature. This research paper looks at the actualization of the studies on identity and identification, describes the history and scope of the identification studies, substantiates the differentiation between the terms of individual/collective identity and identification. The differentiation of the investigated terms is confined to the fact that identification serves as a foundation for constructing identity, so they correlate as a mechanism, process, and result of such mechanism’s operation in an individual self-conscious. Identification is seen as a cognitive-and-emotional mechanism of identity construction, due to which the subject constructs his or her sameness. Identity is a result of recognition and emotional assessment of the individual-and-group and collective characteristics by an individual or group. Such characteristics have been endorsed by the relevant others as a result of constructing the world image, the image of the collective, of individual‟s or group‟s self and their place in there, basing on the specific identifying features.