I
woke up today with a thought asking myself what if mankind never invented the
mirror. Besides the countless number of hours we spend in front of a mirror;
dressing up, doing the hair, applying makeup and/or just admiring ourselves.
What
would be the psychological or emotional impact upon us humans when we’ve never
seen ourselves? I guess I’m getting at self-psychology. Of course from a
physical standpoint we might look untidy, our hair out of place, the pimples on
our face less of a concern, our yellowing teeth outside our consciences.
We,
after all, judge others based in part on how they look. We in many subtle ways
compare other’s with our own sense of ourselves. And, we would still compare
people amongst themselves. For example I mightn’t compare Tom Cruise with my
self but I can compare him with someone else.
When Erik Erikson
talked about identity it of course much more than simply how we look. Erikson’s
framework rests upon a distinction among the psychological sense of continuity
or the “self”, the personal idiosyncrasies that separate one person from the
next, and the collection of social roles that a person might play i.e the social
identity.
Erikson's work, in
the psychodynamic tradition, aimed to investigate the process of identity
formation across a lifespan. Progressive strength in the self-identity, for
example, can be charted in terms of a series of stages in which identity is
formed in response to increasingly sophisticated challenges. Now I’m not for a
minute suggesting that one’s image in the mirror is the sole source of identity
formation – more so asking what part it plays if any.
