Page 96 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

73 Moral Development and Ego Identity

are conscious of themselves, are identical with themselves; and in
such identity they are also unfree to the extent that they stand
under and perpetuate its compulsion. As non-identical, as diffuse
nature, they are unfree; and yet as such they are free, because in
the impulses that overpower them they also become free of the
compulsive character of identity.” ® I read this passage as an
aporetic development of the determinations of an ego identity
that makes freedom possible without demanding for it the price
of unhappiness, violation of one’s inner nature. I want to try
to interpret this dialectical concept of ego identity with the cruder
tools of sociological action theory and without fear of a false
positivity; and I want to do so in such a way that the (no-longer-
concealed) normative content can be incorporated in empirical
theories and the proposed reconstruction of this content can be
opened up to indirect testing.

II
The problems of development grouped around the concept of ego
identity have been treated in three different theoretical tradi-
tions: in analytic ego psychology (H. S. Sullivan, Erikson), in
cognitive developmental psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg), and in
the symbolic interactionist theory of action (Mead, Blumer, Goff-
man, et al.) .* If we step back for a moment and look for points
of convergence among them, we find basic conceptions that can
perhaps be summarized (in a simplified way) as follows.

1. The ability of the adult subject to speak and act is the result of
the integration of maturational and learning processes, the interplay of
which we cannot yet adequately understand. We can distinguish cogni-
tive development from linguistic development and from psychosexual
or motivational development. This motivational development seems to
be intimately connected with the acquisition of interactive competence,
that is, of the ability to take part in interactions (actions and dis-
courses 8
)
2. The formative process of subjects capable of speaking and acting
runs through an irreversible series of discrete and increasingly complex
stages of development; no stage can be skipped over, and each higher
stage implies the preceding stage in the sense of a rationally recon-