The debate around identity tends to generate strong group and social tensions to the point that it makes many people suffer (who frequently, in turn, make others suffer). Obviously it is a very broad topic, but I want to briefly refer to three reductionisms, three very common biases, which I consider to be negative because by oversimplifying the concept of identity, they unnecessarily contribute to increasing the tensions that this topic already entails.
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1. The first reductionism is the one that tends to pose the equation, identity = difference. However, the very term identity refers to what remains, to what is identical to something, “the convenience of each thing with itself” of the classics. Identity comes from the Latin “idem” which means the same.
Identity is a mirror game of similarities and differences. Identity has to do with who we are, with what defines us. How much are we equal and different? It is not easy to answer that question, but I just want to point out that if we look at our origins, we know from an evolutionary perspective that barely 7,000 generations ago, all the humans that populate the earth today (more than 7,000 billion) were linked by ties of blood, we are actually family, we are all relatives (with some exceptions that now would take a long time to explain).
Obviously the difference is a part of the identity. It will be objected to me that there are those who deny it or give it very little value, which is certainly also problematic. But to define identity as difference is to confuse the part with the whole. As the Theory of Meaning points out, identity must be understood more as a relationship than as a property.
From a psychological point of view, for example, we can see how many people suffer because they feel very different from others, anguished by the strangeness of their feelings and fantasies. However, few ideas are more wrong than this. Today we know from cross-cultural psychology and psychiatry studies that psychiatric pathologies are universal and that there is a continuum between healthy and pathological psychological functioning that occurs in all people, here, and in the most remote Melanesian village. When the patient can face this narcissism, not magnify the difference and recognize that he is just another human being, that his symptoms are part of the difficulties in resolving the problems of adaptation to reality that any other human being has, and can then face his reality with serenity, he feels much better
2. The second reductionism that I would like to point out is that of considering identity as something static, fixed, immovable. When identity is dynamic, it is in permanent interaction, it is a construction, a personal process, in which it is also very important to respect and support the freedom of the subject to choose, as far as possible, his own path.
3. The third reductionism consists of defining the identity of the person basing it only on some aspect of the entire set of elements that define it, overvaluing that aspect, and not taking into account that identity encompasses many elements: anatomical, physiological, generational, social, gender, cultural, etc. Answer the question Who am I? It cannot be reduced to delimiting a couple of features, however important they may be considered. Thus, even an aspect as relevant as sex, being biologically male or female, something strongly anchored in the biological, has a high level of complexity (bisexuality, transsexuality, differences between sex and gender, etc.)
In itself, to avoid stigma in relation to identity, for example in the area of mental health, it is considered that one should not say that someone is a schizophrenic, but that they are a person with schizophrenia, because not even a disorder like schizophrenia cannot even come close to defining a person
In short, assimilating identity as a difference, seeing it in a static way, and reducing it to a small number of aspects, favor turning identity into an artificial source of conflicts and suffering.
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