A person’s identity is how he perceives himself, how he answers the question “Who am I?”, “What am I?” Identity is manifested in attitude towards oneself, in stories about oneself, in behavior. The more mature a person is, the more integral, coherent, and “continuous” her self-image is. In fact, however, this maturity and integrity in self-image is not always achieved. More often, our ideas about ourselves are fragmentary and contradictory - it seems that I am goal-oriented, but I am in no hurry to move towards my goals, I seem to love my job, but sometimes I am not happy to go to it, I am friendly, but sometimes I hate people. Psychologist and researcher R. Fogelson highlighted several components of identity that coexist in a person’s mind: – real identity – a person’s self-understanding, the way he sits himself today; – ideal identity – what a person strives for, how he would like to see himself; – negative, “causing fear, irritation “identity is something that a person would like to avoid in himself; – presented identity – images, modes of behavior, an image that is broadcast, presented to others. According to Fogelson’s theory of the “struggle of identities”, we usually try to 1) bring the real identity closer to the ideal and 2) to maximize the distance between real and negative identities, often through manipulation of the presented identity. But our negative identity is actually also a part of ourselves. It is impossible not to love something with which you are not at all familiar; we have something of all those who infuriate us in ourselves. If a swearing market woman annoys me, it means that I, too, probably want to be able to stand up and fight for myself, but for some reason I can’t! - allow. People who are narcissistic and self-centered are annoying - so I also want to talk about myself and be the center of attention? I don’t like shopkeepers, so I don’t mind spending less money on purchases either, I’m just afraid to get involved in an argument. It’s uncultured, it’s not good. We push away from what irritates us, we try to be further from our “negative identity” and thereby only become further from ourselves. Thus, our identity is constantly changing, but its integration, the gathering together of the components of identity does not occur, the part of the person’s “I” that corresponds to the negative identity continues to be rejected - and we do not become ourselves. The article was also published on the author’s professional page: vk.com/going_yourself