Continuity and Commitment: A Developmental Analysis of the Identity Formation Process in Suicidal and Non-suicidal Youth

Abstract

The subject of this chapter is personal continuity and its object is to document the existence of a developmentally ordered sequence of progressively more adequate coping strategies by means of which young persons come to the necessary conclusion that, despite wholesale change, they somehow persist at being relentlessly themselves. In the end, it will be argued that the inability to maintain such an enduring sense of selfhood represents so serious a derailment of the normal identity formation process, that the consequences can prove to be fatal. In advance of the data offered in support of this strong claim, however, it is important to clarify the meaning of personal continuity and how, in principle, a sense of one’s consistency through time might be secured. The chapter moves through this agenda in three steps. Part One is largely a ground-clearing operation and involves a good deal of conceptual spade work, digging into both the meaning of continuous or “numerical” identity and the reasons such coping strategies figure so centrally in the identity formation process. Part Two is more analytic and reports the results of efforts to develop a descriptive typology of the progressively more adequate identity-conferring continuity warrants that people actually employ, in an effort to achieve a secure sense of their own persistence through time. Finally, attention is turned in Part Three to the question of what is at stake should this sense of one’s continuous personal identity go missing. It is here that the practical utility of the proposed typology gains its purchase and the rationale for comparing the coping strategies of suicidal and nonsuicidal youth takes its conceptual hold.