Erik Erikson's stages of identity formation offer some insight into the problems of identity formation or psychosexual development.[11] In adolescence, a child may be concerned with how he appears to others, compared to how he feels about himself. That is, his social identity and personal or ego identity may seem at odds. In this stage, there is a danger of "role diffusion" or doubt about one's sexual identity, which adolescents may seek to avoid by over-identifying with a person of the same or opposite sex, by having a "crush" or "falling in love." This response is "an attempt to arrive at a definition of one's identity by projecting one's diffuse ego images" onto another and "seeing them thus reflected and gradually clarified" (Childhood 228). In young adulthood, when one is faced with the social expectation of courtship and marriage, such "role diffusion" may become a fear of ego loss through self-abandon (i.e., intimacy), and may lead to a deep sense of isolation and, ultimately, self-absorption. A normal adult eventually learns to "lose himself' in sexuality and friendship without the fear of being "engulfed." Where these attempts at intimacy fail, however, the result, in maturity, may be a regression to "individual stagnation," "interpersonal impoverishment," and an obsessive need for "pseudo-intimacy" (Childhood 231).
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