The sense of identity and the role of continuity and confluence

THE concept of identity, as it will be used in this paper, corresponds to Erikson's notion of psychosocial identity. It is a sense of "selfsameness and continuity in time" and of embeddedness in the "environment" (Erikson 1959, 1968). I will describe some of the factors which seem to be essential for the sense of selfsameness, and examine the manner in which continuity is preserved during transitional phases.