What is personal identity and how is it constructed?

In life, where the only constant is change, Why do we tend to believe that our personal identity, what we believe we are, is immutable? The law of change seems to apply to everything, but not to our personal identity. How many times have we heard expressions like: “he is just like that”, “people don’t change”.

When we think about ourselves and our identity, we may entertain the idea that we have always been what we are now; However, when we review old conversations in our Facebook or WhatsApp chat we are astonished, and even ashamed, of that old self, “how was it possible for us to think and write like that!”

Life shows us, time and time again, that our identity is at the mercy of change; What’s more, it is change in itself. It is a constant evolution that is updated according to our life experiences, with our learning and relationships, with the changes in our beliefs and ways of experiencing the world.

In this article we will stop to analyze what personal identity is and how it is constructed.

What is personal identity?

Personal identity is built from a process through which people create our own image and consolidate a set of beliefs about the type of person we are and the properties that differentiate us from others. This identity allows us to answer the following existential question: who am I?

Identity answers the question of who I am.

Identity is a construction that provides us with a sense of permanence and uniqueness. Permanence refers to what we are, being at all times that “being identical to itself.” Singularity gives us the certainty that we are unique and unrepeatable, it is the reference point on which we differentiate ourselves from others.

There are several approaches that define personal identity, among them we can find:

Psychological approach: focuses the understanding of personal identity on the interaction of different processes: memory, thinking, beliefs and emotions. For this approach, identity is a mental property of the human being. It cannot be located biologically.Somatic approach: In this approach it is recognized that personal identity lies in the body. That is, we are what we are thanks to the body we have. We could say that we are our body. This approach is more biological. Personal identity is found in the materiality of the body.Narrative focus: Personal identity is a narrative that the subject constructs for himself and others. Thus, identity is achieved through the narration that people make of their own lives. Identity is a story mediated by language.

Characteristics

Personal identity has several characteristics:

Adaptability: Being a malleable process, it can be adjusted to the different experiences we have. Although it is certainly difficult to abandon or change who we are, we can make adjustments that allow us to better adapt to the environment.Constancy: it is the persistence that we perceive of our identity over time. Although identity is a continuous evolution, it is true that there are certain traits that tend to be more stable over time. These traits represent a usefulness to us and provide us with the basis for saying that we are someone.Coherence: the traits we possess, those characteristics that give us an identity, serve as a means to display our behaviors in the future. They function as an indicator that tells us how to act, in order to maintain, reinforce and consolidate the identity that we have built. Coherence allows us to align who we are with what we do.

The construction of personal identity

The identity It is built based on the different interactive, situational, socio-historical and cultural contexts in which we move daily.. To train, they not only take as reference what happens inside us, but also take into account our interaction with the environment. Its construction does not come only from subjective reality, but also from social reality.

In this interactive process, where we relate to the social world, others have a prominent role in the construction of who we are, since In order for our identity to be delimited, we require another to reaffirm us as different.. By separating ourselves from social reality and becoming an individual, we demarcate what we are, that identity that shapes us.

Can there be an I without a you? The existence of one depends on that of the other. I am me, to the extent that I can distinguish myself from another and can reaffirm myself as a different and singular individual, with his own history and with his own baggage of meanings and interpretations. My identity is built thanks to otherness.

Identity is built from what happens inside us and outside us.

So, Personal identity is configured through the separation and differentiation between the self and others. We are demarcating a limit between what we are and what others are.

In this context, experiences play a central role, since they shape our way of feeling the world and interpreting it. With each of these interpretations we shape our peculiar way of understanding ourselves and the world. These conceptions, ways of feeling, understanding and relating to the socio-historical context give rise to our personal identity.

This construction is dynamic and gradual. It begins in childhood and is consolidated in our adolescence. The experiences that we accumulate and the meanings that we give to them readjust and consolidate our personal identity. In it, with the passage of time, other identities such as gender, sexual, social, etc. converge. All this together makes us who we are.

The questions of identity

Personal identity leaves us with more questions than answers. It is a complex construct to define and understand. So, how to define (that is, put an end to it, delimit) that which is a constant change? Despite its complexity, it is thanks to it that we can say that we are someone.

When we look back and see how we were different in the past compared to what we are now, what makes us different? What made what we were and what existed back then, us? Are what we were and what we are now two or a single personal identity?

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