Through-lines: What Makes Something Descriptive Psychology?

A talk given at the 35th Annual Meeting of The Society for Descriptive Psychology.

A person is defined essentially as a life history. The number of ways that one life history as such can be the same as another or different from it is astronomically large and therefore not directly manageable. Peter Ossorio

There are more ways than one to skin a cat. Seba Smith 

A through-line description is, paradigmatically, the description of a non-contiguous sequence of a person's courses of action as having a shared significance.  For me, that's sufficient formulation.  Greg Colvin 






Through-lines serve as a manageable unit for identifying significant and recurring themes in a life history. A through-line is a stable feature of personality. 

I am proposing that the through-line concept has a useful place within the Dramaturgical Model of Descriptive Psychology. This claim has created controversy and goes to the heart of the question of what makes something authentically Descriptive Psychology.

Concepts, Practices and Subject Matters

What gives a subject matter its integrity? How do people recognize that they are working in a common intellectual endeavor? The answer can be intellectually and politically problematic since it will involve accreditations and degradations.   Since every idea is someone's idea, it comes down to who's in and who's out.

Since I am a practitioner of both psychoanalysis and  Descriptive Psychology, it is these disciplines that I'll address. The answer to my question requires an insider's perspective.  

What holds psychoanalysis together as a coherent intellectual domain? What allows someone working within Descriptive Psychology to recognize that someone else is also? 

The philosopher Stephen Toulmin suggested that to understand what actually counts in a science, look at what the various communities of scientists do rather than focus on their theories. 

What people do is a matter of the conceptual distinctions they have available to guide their actions. Concepts define the actions of the community that uses them. 

This implies that a subject matter is defined primarily by the policies that indicate when and what concepts are employed. An intellectual community's policies and practices point to what is significant and essential to their subject matter. 

Concepts can be appropriate or inappropriate, accepted or rejected, competently or incompetently employed or ignored. Members of a community will have varied reasons, personal or objective, for the concepts they favor and find legitimate.  

One way or another, the question of authenticity involves the concepts and practices employed by the good standing members of the community.

The introduction of through-lines to the community of Descriptive Psychologists involved all these issues.

Since offering this concept, the objections have varied from misunderstandings that pointed to a necessity for greater clarity, to “it’s already covered by existing Descriptive concepts" (It is.  I will turn to this recognition later) to, “call it what you like, just don’t call it Descriptive Psychology.”  

I have been cautioned to keep in mind the problems that attend borrowing a concept that has an established place in other subject matters since through-lines already has a home in sociology and dramaturgy.  All this requires response.

I will not address whether the concept of through-lines is useful except to say it is being actively employed by some of my students and colleagues in making sense of what is in-character and out-of-character behavior. It seems to offer better access than other available concepts.

But the question that concerns me most is what constitutes authentic Descriptive Psychology. The Society for Descriptive Psychology is inexperienced with wrestling with this since there have been no basic concepts accepted that Peter Ossorio did not pen or endorse.  We have had refinements to the basic conceptual network and further applications but nothing really new.

Forgive me in advance, I am going to make a distinction between Peteists and Descriptive Psychology similar to the distinction between Freudians and psychoanalysis. 

The subject matter and communities that practice psychoanalysis are informative. Both Descriptive Psychology and Psychoanalysis were created largely out of the efforts of a single charismatic genius. Freud and Ossorio are similar in other ways as well. Both, for a time, celebrated and complained about isolation. 

Freud and his early circle of followers defined and policed psychoanalysis from 1900 until the late 1930’s.  A body of practices and theories developed during this period that came to rigidly define what Freudians called psychoanalysis. Carl Jung and Alfred Adler’s extensive contributions were included and then excluded when the concepts and language they used and the empirical patterns they privileged were deemed non-psychoanalytic. Eventually, they went their own way.  Similarly, from the 1930’s until the 1970’s, the work of Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney, whose practices and writing clearly resembles Freudian psychoanalytic thought, were also rejected or ignored by the international psychoanalytic establishment.

After Freud’s death the politics of psychoanalysis changed regarding the inclusion and exclusion of people and ideas. Traditionally trained analysts such as Ronald Fairnbain and Donald Winnicott subverted and expanded the subject matter with their “Object Relations” theories.  They used the standard language but employed different meanings for their re-worked concepts.  They dared point where Freudian theory was wrong or incomplete. But as valued insiders they stayed within the organized psychoanalytic community that found their reformulations clinically useful. 

Jung, Adler, Sullivan and Horney created their own Societies and training institutes separate from the organizations that originated with the Freudians, the International Psychoanalytical Association. 

But by the late 1980’s the classical Freudian institutes faced major challenges.  They began to see their memberships decline with a corresponding reduction of their status in the broader intellectual and therapeutic communities. It became harder for their students to find suitable control cases for supervised classical analysis. Under the pressures of a reduced standing in an increasingly medicalized psychiatry, and in fear of restricted trade litigation, the institutes in the United States expanded membership by opening their doors to psychologists and later social workers.

Fortunately by this point, psychoanalysis had undergone a radical self-examination and a reformulation of its essential subject matter. Psychoanalysts had listened to their critics and found many of the critiques on target and consistent with their own evolving world-view. Psychoanalysis dropped its untenable reductionistic metaphysics, attended to its sexism and homophobia, and began to pay heed to the empirical realities.  It got better. It might even survive.

The object-relations people no longer pretended to be talking about libido. Self Psychology and a clinical theory of intentional action and narrative moved to center stage.  The Interpersonal and Cultural schools of Sullivan and Horney were embraced. John Bowlby and the empirically informed Attachment Theorists were quoted, debated and incorporated. Adler was taken almost as seriously as Freud had always taken him.  A conceptually integrated and inclusive Relational Psychoanalysis emerged.

Jung and the mystics remained mostly on the outside. Although Freud and Jung practiced similar clinical methods, the foundations of their subject matters were different. To the Freudians, Jung remained a field mystic with his synchronicity and Time 1–Time 1 shared actions. Freudians are mostly comfortable with Time 1-Time 2 causality of pushes from the unconscious and the past effecting the intentional pull of a person's conscious goals.  Freud and Jung believed they lived in very different worlds, one mechanical and organic, the other spiritual and atemporal.

Nonetheless, the current psychoanalytic community became far more inclusive than the early Freudians allowed. Even with greater inclusion, psychoanalysis maintained an integrity that allows various analysts to recognize each other as kin.  The common ground has less to do with a commitment to theory and more to do with shared central concepts, beliefs and therapeutic policies. Here’s some of why:

Psychoanalysis as a community began to take seriously the question of what makes something psychoanalytic in contrast to what makes someone a strict Freudian.

                     What Makes Something Psychoanalytic?

From 1900 to now, psychoanalytic theory underwent enough transformation that Freud's language is barely recognizable in contemporary writings. Still, something has remained constant in the fundamental style of engagement between analyst and analysand that would allow the first analysts to recognize their  kinship, their clear family resemblance, with the actions of current psychoanalytic therapists. This common ground does not hold for some other therapeutic methods: Analysts have always attempted to engage in a non-coercive therapeutic relationship by  encouraging "free association" in the service of confronting repression.

Since I have written about this elsewhere (Schwartz, 1988), I will only briefly summarize. Freud’s cornerstone of psychoanalysis was the phenomena he called “repression”. Repression variously understood as motivated non-cognizance, avoidance and self-deception is held as a basis of pathology.  Pathology, in the broadest sense, concerns restrictions in a person's ability to effectively and knowingly choose.  

Liberation from repression require analyst and analysand to maintain or develop “an analytic attitude” as they explore what is interfering with the analysand’s competence to love and work.   The focus on attempting “free association” is coupled with the empirically supported belief that the history of a person's body and relationships are what makes them understandable, with early family life setting a course hard to undo. Confronting pathology requires repeated exercises in toleration and awareness. The point of awareness is the possibility of making better choices. This requires knowing what the choices are, given whom one is.

The work requires an open ended engagement for as long as it takes.

The therapeutic goal of psychoanalysis remains a self-aware maturation through the voluntary examination of “transference” and “resistance”.  The goal has always been to increase a person’s potential to engage in Deliberate Action.

The rest are the details. 

My life as an analyst is lived though the varied implementations of the intrinsic social practice of facilitating free-association.  In any way I can, I implement this through empathic and non-coercive attempts at a non-judgmental interpretation of what another person is doing while they are trying to be utterly honest in my presence.  This defines a through-line descriptive of my work life. It also defines the unbroken history of psychoanalysis and my kinship to other analysts. 

What makes something psychoanalytic is not an adherence to Freud but a respect for a particular vision of liberation from unserviceable self-coercive constraint. Freud set the course and identified the project. His words remain informative but only as one voice in the chorus. 

So What Makes Something Descriptive Psychology?

So what makes something Descriptive Psychology?  What are the fundamental commitments of Descriptive Psychologists? Is it devotion to the words of its creator or to the enterprise itself?  Are we Ossorians or are we Descriptive Psychologists?

For the time being we have no choice but to be both since the basic conceptualizations come from one source.

Ossorio created a vast, interrelated and differentiated system that allows for precise descriptions and formulations of the Person Concept. The system’s extent and complexity provide a serviceable map of the interdependent concepts of Individual Person, Behavior, Language, and World. The goal of the project is to make explicit the pre-empirical conceptual foundation required for systematic and complete access to all the facts about persons, their verbal and nonverbal behavior, and their worlds. 

Descriptive Psychology contains a collection of tools for mapping the full set of actual and possible objects, processes, events and the  states of affairs related to behavior. The goal is not a theory to explain or predict a specific pattern but to map where all possible patterns can be located pre-empirically. We still have to go out and see what actually happens, but Descriptive Psychology provides the tools to look carefully without preconceived blinders that limit what we can find. If the existing tools prove inadequate they are replaced or supplemented by more serviceable concepts and formulations. Some mapping tools are better at getting at the relevant terrain than others. 

Descriptive Psychologists are fond of slogans and maxims. We remember Wittgenstein’s policy that "the work of the philosopher consists of assembling reminders for a particular purpose", to "show the fly the way out of the fly bottle". Our job is to see our way clearly without foreclosing on what we might find if we care to look. 

Descriptive Psychologists develop tools that are precise and permissive with the goal that they exactly include what we are after without excluding what we may also need to consider. (Hence, the Paradigm Case Formulations and Parametric Analyses described below).

The Descriptive Psychological slogans and maxims provide a behavioral logic, an ever-expanding collection of reminders and guides, for sound description and explication.

Descriptive Psychology has other associated commitments. Since the tools are concepts rather than theories the criteria for success are competence and effective action. The project is essentially pragmatic, not metaphysical or ontological.

Given the absence of theory or metaphysics, there is not a commitment to forms of explanation that are exclusively causal or deterministic.  Descriptive Psychology relies on rules and unless clauses rather than laws.

Descriptive Psychology also has methods for systematically getting at everything in a fashion that allows critics to precisely determine where they agree and where they disagree.  As a system, Descriptive Psychology is essentially top-down and non-reductionistic; it establishes a format for all possible compositions and decompositions.  Generally we like to start with complex, indubitable and primary examples before we get too engaged with their parts and variations. We employ Paradigm Case Formulations and Parametric Analysis for this purpose and to establish common ground with different observers and critics. We like to know if we are on the same page with others and employ methods specific for accomplishing this.

Descriptive Psychology is the intellectual discipline devoted to making coherent and explicit the implicit structure of all other intellectual disciplines. I believe the existing body of Descriptive Psychology has gone a considerable distance toward accomplishing this goal. I think it is mature enough that refinement and expansion can proceed on a shared understanding of what it is about. 

Some areas are more extensively mapped than others. I think some important conceptual relationships remain under-articulated or are yet to be explored. With new problems and recognitions will come new tools that maintain a coherent connection to what has already been elaborated as The Person Concept.

For example:

The first 20 or so years of Descriptive Psychology, “Persons” were defined as Individuals whose history is, paradigmatically, a history of Deliberate Action.  By 1999 the definition was further elaborated to “a person is an individual whose history is, paradigmatically, a history of Deliberate Action in a Dramaturgical Pattern.”

At the 2000 meeting of The Society for Descriptive Psychology, Ossorio said: 

“The  Dramaturgical pattern is based on the model of a social practice. It’s an episode. And that’s what human life consists of,  this kind of episode. The discussion of self-concept depended on that, that you live your life not just engaged in this Deliberate Action followed by another one followed by another one. What you’re living is meaningful patterns of Deliberate Actions. And the closest approximation we have is a social practice. So that’s what I mean by a dramaturgical pattern. You have to have that kind of history, not just a history of Deliberate Action.”

This later addition to the canon of Descriptive Psychology has its origins in other arenas. When Ossorio was introducing his use of dramaturgical he was clear that he didn’t need to reinvent the wheel nor did he need to take on all of the baggage that attends dramaturgical in other contexts. And drama , he pointed out, is a conceptual option, more inclusive than “narrative” but, at times, less intuitively on point than “game”.

You buy your ticket and you take your chances.

Does Descriptive Psychology really need the concept of “through-lines”?  My assertion is that the “through-line” concept offers a more effective and exact way to get at important patterns in the lives of persons than our other conceptual tools. “Through-lines” connects to all the rest of Descriptive Psychology through the concepts of “social practice”, “significance”, “performance” and “achievement”. It is a specific assemblage of concepts that has not, until now, been adequately articulated. Without this concept, we can make sense of what it gets at, but only awkwardly and ineffectively. "Through-lines" captures a set of distinctions central to how we know each other. It intuitively makes sense.

It's a better mousetrap.

It provides a strategic form of description for Descriptive Psychology's Dramaturgical Model. 

Occupying the intermediate zone between social practices and ways of life, “through-lines” distinguish a fundamental aspect of the conservative and stable structure of personality.  As a concept, it is non-theoretical, pre-empirical, non-deterministic, connects to all other Descriptive concepts, respects the slogans, doesn’t violate any maxims, can be subjected to a parametric analysis and doesn’t exclude other behavioral facts or possibilities.

It sounds pretty much like Descriptive Psychology to me. (Say with dramatic flourish, bow, dim lights, fade to stage left).

This is a draft of a paper presented at The 35th Annual Meeting of the Society for Descriptive Psychology in Golden, Colorado, October 17-20, 2013. 


Here's an explication of a "through-line" description.

To say that a Person "A"  knows one of Person "B's" Through-Lines, she would have observed that

A) "B" engaged in a series of social practices that

B) Share a common significance 

C) The specific implementation/performance of the practices

D) What the implementations achieved in "B's" world

E) What "B" knows regarding what the implementations achieved

F) How "B" appraised the consequences of the achievement

G) How "B" did or did not correct his course of action based on his appraisal of the consequences.

And produce

H) A significance description that encompasses A) through G) and names this particular through-line. (Reduce the details until a workable encompassing significance description is offered)




From Anthony Putman on 2/02/2016

From a note written to the Descriptive Psychology Community:

"Dropping the details (and a nod to Greg Colvin):  "Through-line" is a complex form of behavior description, which one might treat as a Personal Characteristic Description. It is a pattern consisting of a sequence of courses of action, by a particular person, that have shared significance. 
Everything else is detail.

"Through-line" is a Descriptive Psychology formulation, offered by a fully-accredited member of the DP community using the DP conceptual framework. 

Like any community without a "living source", we change our concepts and practices via consensus, that is, enough members including elders think it's right, and everyone else can at least live with it. Anyone who can't live with "through-lines" as a DP concept really should consider their ethical obligation to speak up and say why.


It is Observer/Critic, not Actor concept. Through-lines explicitly are not causes of behavior, nor could they be. In that regard I would remind you of Ossorio on the Actor's world: "As an Actor I see the real world as a field of action, as the domain within which I live my life. In it are givens and possibilities, opportunities and non-opportunities, hindrances and facilitations for behavior. In it are reasons for acting one way or another. I am sensitized to behaviors that are available and ways of being that are available. There is no question of who or what I am – I am me. There is no question of my inclinations and proclivities; I do not need to know what they are, although I often do – what is primary is that I have them, and my having them is not something different from being me. In particular, they are not peculiar entities or forces that cause me to do what I do.""

In a 1980 seminar, Peter Ossorio talked about personal identity. 
His remarks are consistent with the through-line concept and can be heard here: https://netfiles.umn.edu/xythoswfs/webui/_xy-e17110922_1-t_bAEvrO7f 

Or read here: Pete: This guy doesn't know his own mind. The kind of cases where we start talking about identity problems fall in this general area. They have to do with the kind of things that...career choices, things like personal relationships. things like tastes in avocations or interests. You might say those things that have a high degree of personal significance. And when somebody says, I'm going to do X or I like X, you expect that not to change from day to day, from week to week, or even month to month. In effect, the kind of thing where when somebody says that, he's making a long-term commitment. And carrying off the long-term commitment is based on that kind of consistency and stability over time. I used to ask the question, Why can't a three year old make you a promise? The answer is exactly this kind of thing. With a three-year-old, you don't expect that kind of consistency. So when a TYO says I promise I will do something or just says I will do something, it doesn't carry the same implication that, in fact, he's going to do it; and there's something wrong if he doesn't. A TYO is not only not consistent enough but he doesn't know enough about himself, so that even if he were consistent, he would know it. So there are several grounds on which young children cannot make the kind of commitments, the failure of which we call identity issues or identity problems. 
You can classify these kinds of issues. That's why you get things like masculine identity, career identity, personal identity. You can subdivide into types of identity. ?!What about the problem of identifying with...the whole issue of identification? It's a relatively different kind of problem. ?!In what way? That has to do with positive characteristics. You acquire positive characteristics by identifying. So far, what we've been talking about is inconsistency. So even though we classically use "identify", which has the same etymological root, the background phenomenon is a different one, even though there are certain connections. ?!It's interesting...this approach, the expectation is the intrinsic social practice, whereas a lot of the literature, you know, how the Goffman sort of tradition on identity management puts the emphasis on—
Pete: self presentation
?: —just the presentation for the purpose that you have to be predictable. So that's a distinction between the typical literature and this one.
?: Have you ever read Keith's paper on this? Keith in his article Identity, Alienation and Ways of Life, his first subhead is What holds a society together? This social norm thing you are talking about—if the society is held together by more than fear, then the positive basis must consist in some appreciation by the individual of his own place in it and if what everyone else is getting out of society's practices and institution. In a sense, that the arrangement benefits those taking part in it. So it's the intrinsic practice...<omitting CZ'z reading of KED's article> He's talking here about changing identity.
?: Isn't there a qualitatively between a sense of identity and what we were talking about?
Pete: Sense of identity is one of those subjective notions. When I say identity, I mean identity. There's nothing called identity out there. It's objective language, but it's not referential. It doesn't refer to a thing called your identity.
?: Would you say a little bit more about central vs. masculine identity, career identity? It sounds like something like masculine identity gets into role, it has responsibilities and duties and rights assigned to it. That gets into this thing. Something that's more central identity...in Erickson's kind of thing, they talk about identity diffusion. Then there's for example time confusion. There's identity integration, there's time orientation. That seems to be a more basic kind of thing than masculine identity, and knowing what to do with that in that role.
Pete: Tee, give Carl a five-minute lecture on status and role.
?: and relate it to identity, please.
Pete: in relation 6, he's talking about masculine role. There isn't any. There's masculine status. There isn't a specification of behaviors, which is what's required for roles.
?: I was going back to your saying in the culture, once you are past a certain age, if you say you're going to do a certain thing, people expect you to follow through in a certain way. That sounds like responsibilities, duties, and obligations.
Pete: No, it's not that they expect you to follow through in a certain way, it's that they expect you to follow through. It's up to their own competence to recognize whether what you've done qualifies as following through. That's why I say there's no role. There's no way...If I say I'm going to be an important man some day, and later on, you see me trying to get myself elected senator, you can't say, well back then when he said I'm going to be an important man some day, this is what he was promising us. But you can sure as hell recognize I'm on the same track and I am in fact delivering what I promised.
I think...let's switch to some positive. Think of why someone with multiple personalities would qualify as somebody with identity problems. 
?: A lot of the schizophrenics I saw at some point in therapy when they were getting better, they came to a point where they said Well, I think what I have is an identity crisis. I certainly validated that because it's a lot easier to work on that than to say you're crazy and let's work on that. But there's like a good grain of truth in that.
Pete: in what?
?: In their saying I have an identity crisis. It was really a lot of people that said that.
Pete: let's stick with the question of why would somebody with multiple personalities would have an identity problem.
CZ: Well, if you're Pete today and Dan tomorrow, you can't follow through very well.
Pete: Yeah. The only time we say that somebody has multiple identities is when there's enough difference between how you're operating when you're one of these and how you're operating when you're another; when that difference is comparable to the difference between one person and another. And that means there is the kind of discontinuities I was talking about. 
Now, what's added with this notion of multiple personalities is that you have the whole you might say flow of lives segregated into subunits, each of which has the very kind of continuity within that that you expect in a normal person. So, on the days when I'm Pete, from the last time I was Pete and today, you can detect the same kind of continuity that a normal person will show over that much time. And on successive times when I am Dan, you can detect the same kind of continuity, too.
But that brings us back to the original notion of consistency and what kind of consistencies are involved. In consistency there are all kinds of possibilities and different people will choose different possibilities; and the same person will continue to choose the same sorts of possibilities over time. If you introduce a taxonomy or some way of describing or characterizing which of the possibilities a person chooses, there you get the positive notion of identity. That amounts to <skip> itself. What kind of person is he? That’s the one that connects to identification. Identification is used to account for why you are the kind of person you are. Why you have the personal characteristics you do.
?: going back to earlier, when Jane asked the question about adolescents, what if you say something you will know turns somebody off...there is the move of saying "you don't really expect me to be consistent"
Pete: At a minimum, I would say, You don't expect me to be consistent that way, do you? You don't want to deny consistency, you want to reject some particular consistency. 
?: usually they are preoccupied enough with that whole being consistent themselves.
Pete: even so, #1, you don't want to reject explicitly that you are going to be consistent. What you do is identify whatever it is you want to reject and say you don't expect me to be consistent that way.
?: Inconsistency jars. If you are watching, an inconsistency will catch you. You can be inconsistent, but you must be inconsistently inconsistent. Much like Steve Martin. For him to launch into a serious talk in the middle of one of his monologues, everyone would be taken aback.
?: You're talking about what we call out of character.
?: Not even out of character. The inconsistency jars. Think about Jim Neighbors, his speaking voice vs. his singing voice. A remarkable difference. It's the same thing with people. They're behaving along, and everything is going right with the world, no matter how strange it is, and for them to do something that is inconsistent, you have to go back and reconstruct the character in which that is possible, particularly if it happens often enough. Or: he always does that when he's drunk. That explains it. Or: something like that. Or: he's that way unless he gets angry, then the whole thing changes. Which brings me to: what's the difference between talking about multiple personalities and multiple identities? Because when you were talking about it, you shifted over to multiple personalities. Is that the same as a person with multiple identities? Except we don't use that term.
Pete: No, but I think you could. Whenever you have somebody who has MP, you could straightforwardly say they have MI, and here's what they are. And that's because of the regularities within the personalities. And if there weren't that regularity, then you'd talk about diffusion, fragmentation, and so forth.
Something just occurred to me. The issue is: what kind of unit a person is. It occurred to me that one reason identity is such a magic term is that most people think of persons as organisms. They think of the person right now as the state of the organism right now, so things that have to do with unity over time have a kind of magical quality. The basic set of ideas has no way to encompass a unity over time. It has to appear like some very special and peculiar phenomena. In contrast, think of the definition of a person as an individual whose history is one of intentional action. The idea that the basic concept of a person is a life  history. So if there is such a thing as a single person, then that corresponds to a history that has certain distinguishable characteristics as a history. That  means over time there must be something consistent, or you couldn't distinguish it as A history.
?: So, in that sense, identity would be a kind of unifying element, or you as an observer would look at the totality and say that's his identity.
Pete: No. You'd say "that's him". You don't need a magic term like identity to do the job of pulling these various cross-sections together because your basic unit is a longitudinal unit. A longitudinal unit doesn't need anything to hold the cross-sections together.
?: What was the distinction you were making between the identity and self, then?
Pete: I said that in the cases of multiple personalities, you could say that a person had multiple identities.
?: I think it was the same thing you just said to Dan. You don't need to introduce...you just say it's him. 
Pete: yeah
?: Was that the same as just saying it's himself. You made some distinction between talking about identity and talking about self.
Pete: yeah. Identity becomes redundant in most of its traditional uses in Descriptive because you have a different kind of unit for people, namely, one which is longitudinal. And since you have a long. unit, all you need is the notion of some thing of that sort. What you don't need is a concept that connects the pieces through time. 
?: Identity would be a term you use when you went over people, or trying to explain the same sort of thing...
Pete: Yeah, distinguishing one person from another. Part of the etymology of identity is to identify. Identify contrasts with describe. You identify a person if you are able to specify which person this one is. It is no descriptions implied whatever. For example, your name normally in practical circumstances does that it distinguishes which person is involved. It has nothing to do with description. Simply which. On the other hand, there needs to be something talked about that way. The closest thing there is to that something is a life history. If you can think of it as a something, then it can't be just scattered, just fragmentary, the parts of it can't be just plain unconnected. Our usual way of talking about the connectedness of the parts is to talk about consistency over time. It's not sameness over time, identical sameness. It's simply that there is something there. If you look at a table, when you see it, you don't see it as a surface, not even  a three-dimensional surface. You see it as a solid something with parts of it you don't see yet, and the whole thing hangs together. What would that table look like if the edges were discontinuous?  You know, like the stick in the water. What would things look like if there were those kinds of discontinuities in their texture, shapes, etc. If there was a 1 foot gap in the middle of this table. Or on this side it's gray and on this side, it's bright orange. 
?: I'm trying to think now about Erickson and what he was talking about, if not identity. He was talking about the points of expected discontinuity in a person's life history. In terms of "the issues at various points in time" that Ericksen wrote about.

©The Estate of Peter G. Ossorio