15 WARRIOR IDENTITY PROBLEM

Adolescent Psychiatry,  2004  by Sugar, Max

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A study by Gray and Steinberg (1999) found that families with excessive psychological control seem to stifle autonomy in their youngsters. This decreases their ability for self-reliant decision making and may lead to problems in moral reasoning. If the military is viewed as a substitute family with excessive control of the adolescent, then it seems to follow that autonomous and individual superego functioning by youth are largely curtailed because they are controlled by the military. The adolescents' options for autonomy are sealed, or very limited, because of the structure and strictures of the military life. The military teaches them to become warriors.

Although the authoritarian and rigid military structure stifles most independent, autonomous functioning, it provides a very exaggerated phallic cult for a foreclosed identity, that of a warrior. For most youth who have a two- or three-year enlistment, this is a temporary identity and may even serve as a moratorium without impeding later normative identity development. If they remain in the military permanently, the identity of warrior is appropriate for that endeavor.

Delineation of Warrior Identity Problem

Erikson (1959) felt that acute identity diffusion occurred in some youth during late adolescence after exposure to "a combination of experiences which demand simultaneous commitment" (p. 123) to physical intimacy, decisive occupational choice, energetic competition, and psychosocial definition. These youth also have identity diffusion, disturbed time perspective, intimacy problems, and industry diffusion.

Erikson (1959) noted that such conflicts are sometimes expressed subtly by choosing a negative identity, that is, an identity that rejects the roles and ideals offered by one's family or immediate community. The negative identity provides the young person with his own individual corner, that is, some semblance of autonomy to counter the excessive ideals demanded by "morbidly ambitious parents or seemingly already realized actually superior ones" (pp. 131-132). Such an identity is based on the most undesirable, or dangerous, roles, or identifications. Conceivably, this may be due to unconscious rebellion against parents; but the negative identity also offers a slightly more organized, cohesive, and thus more real, identity than the aimless, unfocused identity the youth have had with just identity problem. It is my hypothesis that WIP develops on the foundation of identity problem and a negative identity.

The effort to learn about the childhood and adolescence of veterans with WIP is difficult; data based on recollections are cloudy and idealized because they are retrospective and often obtained after a lengthy chronological gap. Despite the problems with much of these data, we should not conclude that nothing can be known about the pathogenesis of identity problem and negative identity, or that these conditions appear in late adolescence sui generis without any forebears. Further research may enlighten us about this area, but in the meantime, clinical observation will have to serve as the basis of our knowledge.