Stigma and identity: A multiple case history of people with AIDS.

Abstract

The existing literature on stigma describes stigma in terms of groups' actions and attitudes, with little attention to the experience of stigmatized individuals. This study adopts the multideterministic view of Erikson, who asserts that people's experiences are influenced by cultural, interpersonal, intrapsychic and developmental factors. The reader is encouraged in particular to attend carefully to the narrative histories of study participants. These tell how the current experience of social rejection becomes personally relevant within a context of cultural factors, interpersonal relationships and life historical experiences of abandonment and ostracism. The stigma experience is likened to an identity crisis, through which the individual appropriates aspects of the social attitude toward him in personally specific ways. Unlike developmental and normative crises like adolescence, the identity crises provoked by stigma are seen as traumatically imposed on participants. Participants' narratives describe their reactions to stigma in experiences of disequilibration which bring to bear aspects of their personal histories. One section of the dissertation presents ways social definitions and labels such as "Black", "gay", and "individualist" are selectively utilized by participants to highlight aspects of their conflicts about self-definition. Another section illustrates ways participants' expectations of dependency, separateness, and autonomy in relationships are patterned historically and stimulated in the stigma experience. A final section discusses participants' conflicts about self integrity as it is threatened by the social imposition of stigma. These findings support the view that the group attributions promoted by stigmatization are internalized by people with AIDS, but with personal specificity. Attending to their stories permits a richer understanding of the complex social psychology of stigma, occurring in a shared social context which attempts to detrimentally divide the HIV-infected population from the non-infected. We may then come to a finer, more tolerant appreciation of the common humanity of stigmatized people insofar as reading their narratives stimulates an awareness of comparable experiences in our own lives.