The lead-off question I chose at the very beginning of the study in 1972 was “If there is someone you wanted to know you, what sorts of things would you tell about yourself?”

Erikson noted that complex societies make available what he called a “moratorium” period in which young people are given a time-out to try on possibilities without the social world taking their choices too seriously. College environments are ideally suited for such a moratorium period. College students are given license to experiment—with different

By and large and with some exceptions, these women are not very prone to self-reflection or pondering their own development. Mostly, they face forward rather than inward. They are not psychologists, and they don’t think the way I do, always wanting to know how and why people are the way they are. Yet I think they enjoy the “stranger on the train”

others. The “I” enlarges to the “We.” Because Erikson’s model is often understood to mean that one has to know who one is before one can commit oneself to another in a mutually interdependent way, I came to this study with a question about whether this is also true for women. How, I wondered, do intimacy and identity intersect in women?15

The young person (in industrialized society) is challenged by the alternatives available to choose a way of being in the world, to affirm what she will stand for as she takes her place in the adult world. This could be about occupation (what she will DO) or ideology (what she will BELIEVE).

me.” This is not the answer I was hoping for. I wanted to hear about what I then thought was real identity—their occupational and ideological commitments. This is what Erikson had theorized identity was about. In 1972,

groups: those who have made commitments following a period of exploration (Identity Achievements/Pathmakers); those who made commitments without exploration, carrying forward childhood goals and beliefs (Foreclosures/Guardians); those who were still in a moratorium period, still exploring (Moratoriums/Searchers); and those without commitments who

Tolerance of difference from parents, even in ways that might perturb them, was, at this age, the hallmark of the internal psychological work that made independent identity creation possible. Where the Guardians could not free themselves from parental models or values and the Searchers could not overcome their guilt at doing so, the Pathmakers

Many psychologists have written extensively and thoughtfully about identity from an Eriksonian point of view, too many to adequately reference here. For current reviews, see especially