Forging Our identity and Establishing Intimacy
For the Eriksonians, the direct challenges of friendship take place during our late adolescent years and our early adult years. It is during these years that we forge our identity and begin to discover the role we will play in our society. This identify formation is often (even usually) done in conjunction with our friends. While parents and siblings help us shape our initial sense of self during earlier years in our life, it is when we go out into the world and “hang around” young people who are not members of our immediate family that we get a clearer sense of who we “are” in relationship to other people.
Theory of Mind
Psychologists (especially those with a psychoanalytic bent) often describe the infant’s sense of reality as being “narcissistic” with the young child being unable to distinguish their own reality from the reality outside themselves. From this preliminary “primary narcissism”, the child moves to a family-centric sense of reality: the world is centered in and defined by their family life—even if this life is highly dysfunctional. It is during one’s adolescent years that one encounters and engages with alternative perspectives held by people outside one’s family. Psychologists now write about a “theory of mind” that tends to develop both during our years inside the family and during years outside the family. We begin to recognize that there are differing ways to view the world and that these differing perspectives can lead to differing decisions and actions—that are justifiable. We acquire a “theory of mind” that enables us interact with and learn from people who differ from us.
Denworth (2020, p. 6) frames it this way. As children we glance at one another when playing a game together. We notice what the other child is up to, sometimes imitating, sometimes grabbing. At this age, Denworth suggests that children:
“. . . are not yet cognitively capable of full differentiating themselves from others or taking someone else’s perspective. But they’re on their way. That emerging capacity is called theory of mind. It is the landmark social development of the toddle years that allows young children to have friends.”
It is during these formative years of adolescence that we not only form a theory of mind, but also a clearer sense of self. Actually, as the esteemed psychiatrist, Harry Stack Sullivan has noted, we gain a clearer sense of the multiple selves we establish in our relationship with other people (Sullivan, 1953a). One of Sullivan’s proteges, Patrick Mullahy, has declared: “it is not a person as an isolated and self-contained entity that one is studying, or can study, but a situation, an interpersonal situation, composed of two or more people.” (Sullivan, 1953b, p. 245) Our sense of self shifts as the interpersonal situations in which we find ourself tends to shift.
By moving outside our immediate family and forming friendships, we discover that we are multiple selves when interacting with friends who differ from one another as well as differing from us. If we attend public school then we are “forced” to interact with other students who come from different socio-economic levels as well as different races and ethnic backgrounds. Multiple religions are represented, as are a wide range of political beliefs and cultural artifacts (such as clothing, makeup, body adornments and dialect). This diversity might decrease when attending a private school or a church-related school—and parents often chose to send their children to these more “sheltered” schools precisely because they are fearful of public-school diversity.
