By the 1980s, identity has become a stock technical term in sociology and a widespread social label. Before the early 1940s, it was unknown. Within the span of about forty years, identity has become an indispensable technical term and a cultural buzzword. Its theoretical, empirical, and cultural importance shows no sign of abating as social scientists, clinicians, historians, psychologists, philosophers, and the media continue to apply, dispute, and develop the idea. Nevertheless, identity lacks an adequate theoretical development in contemporary sociological social psychology (cf. Rosenberg and Turner 1981).

The expanse of scholarly and popular writings on identity cannot, of course, be adequately handled in a single chapter. Nor is it our intent to do so. Rather, we focus on but one of the themes within the general issue of identity – namely, how this idea took shape and continues to thrive within the development of a sociological social psychology, or sociological psychology (see Weigert 1975). The presentation of material follows the chronological order of the seminal writings on identity. We focus the emergence of identity within sociological psychology around three questions:

1. What are the recent origins of the concept?

2. How did it find its way into sociological psychology?

3. Why was it so quickly taken over by sociological psychologists?

Accordingly, we attempt to locate the emergence of the term in its historical context, and to limn the main lines of development within sociological psychology.

Precursors to the concept of identity had been developing in the domains of sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The research and theorizing in these disciplines gave central importance to such concepts as self, character, and personality, respectively, through the period of World War II.