William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and was the son of a traveling preacher and a mother who worked hard to support her family. An excellent student, Du Bois maintained high grades in high school while working as a reporter for a local newspaper. Though Du Bois wanted to attend Harvard University, his mother's death in 1884 forced him to put aside his dream and to live with his aunt while he worked (W.E.B. Du Bois, 2002).
This report will examine the formation of Du Bois' identity, drawing upon the theories of Alfred Adler and Erik Erikson. It will first, describe the basic theories advanced by Erikson and Adler and then apply these theories to Du Bois' formation of a unique identity combining a strong attachment to African culture along with an immersion in the American intellectual milieu and his emergence as a proponent of civil rights and equality. It will be argued that Erikson's concept of psychosocial identity formation is particularly appropriate for Du Bois.
Adlerian theory, according to Osborn (2001), presents a view of the individual as a whole entity, a composite being, and not a collection of parts thrown together and reduced to such names as ego, superego, libido, and id. Each human being, therefore, is to be viewed in his or her entirety as a uniquely configured person who thinks, feels, and behaves as a unified whole. Osborn (2001) maintains that Adler's holistic view emphasizes the totality of the individual and his or her experiences. Human behavior is understood as pulled forward by constructed goals and not pushed from behind by predetermined explanations or instinctual drives.
Friedman (1999) has stated that Erik Erikson is best known for his formulation of the identity concept. A Freudian who anticipated the analytic drift toward ego psychology and its preoccupation with how human organisms become social selves, Erikson proposed that individuals mu...