How Much Control Do We Have in Shaping Our Own Identity?

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How much control do we have in shaping our own identity? The purpose of this essay is to give an explanation of identity in a social science context and to show how agency and structure have a part to play in control of our identities. Agency and structure will be explained and the tension between the two will be shown through the studies of Mead, Goffman, and Freud. The essay will finish with a look at how out identities are shaped by occupation, gender and place. What is identity in social scientific terms? Identity is a set of ideals or groups that a person relates to and adopts and having an identity isn’t solely to do with your personality. Identity requires a choice to be made on the individual’s part, they choose to identify with a certain group and many groups can build an identity. The social scientist Madan Sarup used passports to illustrate the concept of collective identity a passport tells another person our nationality, gender, and age to another person , which signifies our identity. Sarup has had three passports, each passport shows him aging, he is asked which one is the real him? Of course all are him but he is no longer identified as the young man in his first passport or the middle aged man in his second as his identity has changed. The passports show the tension between how Sarup sees himself and how others see him, in other words there is a difference between the personal and the social or in social science terms the difference between agency and structure. Agency is the degree of control which we ourselves can exert over who we are, while structure is the force beyond our control which shapes our identity. How have others explained identity? Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud is psychoanalytic theory presented us with the understanding of the unconscious. The unconscious mind is the vault of repressed feelings, many of
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