[See here for the review of Gran Torino from last September.]
When I first mentioned the “Pentimento pause” category (see
here, #5), I said it would encompass occasional little updates to,
or assessments of, previous blog entries. Originally the idea seemed largely to
be to allow second-guessing of myself or revising a previous position, but
there was nothing to stop the category from offering important information that
supplements previous posts, leaving the original posts as they are.
This first entry is to offer some material related to psychologist
James Marcia that I had wanted to offer last year but did not have at hand at
the time.
James Marcia, a psychological theorist, I mentioned as
having theories on a person’s sense of
time as shaped by the presence or absence of past life struggles in his or her personal
history. As I also said in the Gran
Torino post, Marcia is a
theorist on whom I have just cursory knowledge (who seems to have been a theoretic
disciple of Erik Erikson, on whom I know more). Marcia theorized about four
general “states of being” (my slightly vague ad hoc phrase, not his) in
relation to how one stood regarding a sense of time related to life history.
These states are shaped by how one had previously worked through problems in
life, and they are: foreclosure, identity
diffusion, moratorium, and identity
achievement.
One key source for my understanding of this was a schematic New York Times explanation, using a
figure involving a drawing of an hourglass, from about 1986. I couldn’t find it
last September, but found it recently. I was careless enough when I cut out the
clip that I didn’t include the date with it (not my usual practice).
The headline for the figure is “How Sense of Identity
Influences Time Orientation.”
In a region of the figure labeled with “focus on past,” the
type of mentality labeled “Diffusion” is defined with “People without a sense of identity or crisis about it emphasize the
past most and the future least.”
A little lower in the same region is “Moratorium,” defined
with “People in the throes of doubt
about their identity see themselves more in their pasts than in their future.”
In the middle of the figure is the label “focus on present,”
where a long statement is, “People who
can imagine themselves far in the future have a very different sense of life
and its possibilities than people who live only for the moment or who
concentrate on the past, according to new research on time orientation.”
In a region labeled “focus on future,” there is the category
“Achievement,” defined with “People who
achieved identity through crisis have the most balanced sense of time.”
