Summary: | The problem of identity and identification has been occupying a prominent place in research studies since the early 20th century and is one of the most relevant issues in the science of the late 20th - early 21st centuries. It is determined by the changes in socio-cultural reality in the post-modern societies of the second half of the 20th century, the crisis in the existential approach to the personality studies, enhanced integrative trends in the scientific thinking, its humanitarianization and anthropocentric nature.
This research paper looks at the actualization of the studies on identity and identification, describes the history and scope of the identification studies, substantiates the differentiation between the terms of individual/collective identity and identification.
The subject of the article is the phenomenological and conceptual essence of identity and identification. The goal of the article is to substantiate identity and identification as the phenomena and scientific concepts. The methodological basis of the research includes the complex of the general research methods, namely: observation, description, induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, taxonomy and modelling.
The differentiation of the investigated terms reduces to the fact that identification serves as a foundation for constructing identity, so they correlate as a mechanism, process, and result of such mechanism’s operation in an individual self-conscious. Identification is seen as a cognitive-and-emotional mechanism of identity construction, due to which the subject constructs his or her own sameness. Identity is a result of recognition and emotional assessment of the individual-and-group and collective characteristics by an individual or group. Such characteristics have been endorsed by the relevant others as a result of constructing the world image, the image of the collective, of individual's or group's self and their place in there, basing on the specific identifying features.
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