Artistic Identity
A resource sheet for artists in transition, doubt, or quiet reckoning
What Is Artistic Identity?
Artistic identity often forms early and runs deep. For many artists, it shapes not just their profession, but their sense of self — their routines, values, and emotional ecosystem. This identity can be powerful, creative, and sustaining. But it can also become rigid, over-identified, or even painful when life circumstances shift.
We at The Green Room often work with artists who struggle to define themselves outside their artistic identity. This becomes especially difficult when…
they never truly chose the path — they adopted the identity of an artist early on, before they were fully capable of making life-defining decisions.
what once felt like a calling now feels like a cage, something they can’t escape.
they’re forced to step back — due to injury, illness, burnout, or simply because the career isn’t sustainable — and are left unsure of who they are without the artist-identity.
art has consumed so much of their life that it’s left damage in its wake — relationships suffer, other needs are neglected, and a fuller sense of self never gets to grow.
When an identity is threatened, the artist may experience dread, fear, or emptiness:
What is there in me besides an “Artist”?
Who am I without the label “Artist”?
What can I do outside of art?
Identity as a Story — and a Strategy
“Self-knowledge is not knowledge, but a story one tells about oneself.”
– Simone de Beauvoir
We construct our identities through:
what we do,
what happens to us,
and how we are perceived by others.
This narrative web shapes what we call identity, personality, or self-concept. But it’s not always freely chosen. As Alain de Botton notes, “The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.”
Wilhelm Reich, decades earlier, proposed something similar: that our identities are often stitched together from parts of ourselves we’ve had to push away.
“Our identities are formed not just from what we love or choose, but from how we’ve adapted to fear, anxiety, and the ache of unmet needs — especially the needs to feel safe, to belong, and to act freely.”
We may build coping structures — protective poses, fixed traits, an idealized sense of self — that allow us to survive difficulty. Over time, these can become limiting.
The False Self and the Role of Recognition
We don’t develop a sense of self in isolation.
Our identities are shaped through relational experience, especially in response to those whose feedback mattered most. Donald Winnicott described how a False Self can emerge when early bids for connection are met with indifference, intrusion, or pressure. In such cases, the child may shape themselves into what they believe is expected: compliant, pleasing, manageable. This adaptation protects the child from the pain of rejection or disappointment, but it also buries the more spontaneous, alive, and expressive parts of the self. The False Self is born.
Over time, this mask can harden. As Winnicott said:
“It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.”
Why Artistic Identity Becomes Fragile
Children often begin forming a coherent sense of self between ages seven and eleven — the same age many begin to internalize the identity of “Artist.” These two processes can become deeply entangled. The artistic identity becomes not just one part of who they are, but the entire structure. And it’s a fragile one.
Later, if life changes — if they lose their voice, their stage, or their conviction — the collapse of identity can feel total. The artist may compensate by constructing a more flattering but rigid persona. As Karen Horney wrote, we may develop an “idealised self-image” of “a hero, a genius, a supreme lover, a saint, a god.”
But this image is hard to live up to. Eventually, the real self inevitably falls short. It begins to feel defective, unwanted, so we push it away. What’s left is performance without true presence. A life is shaped around maintaining the image, rather than living from the core.
Widening the Scope of Self
It’s no wonder that so many artists struggle to experience themselves outside the identity of ‘Artist.’ For many, this identity took root early — at the very moment their broader sense of self was still forming. Over time, the two became indistinguishable.
But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
It takes courage and time to widen the scope of self. It is a worthwhile undertaking, as no one’s self can be reduced to one activity, no matter how lovely that activity might be.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Letting go of a fixed identity can feel like falling apart. But it’s also a chance to loosen, breathe, and integrate the parts of ourselves that have waited to be (re)discovered.
What Helps
Body-based practice
Anchoring in the body through somatic practices or meditation brings groundedness, presence, and perspective to the narrow confines of a rigid identity structure.
Psychotherapeutic inquiry
Others go deep into self-exploration: Who am I without the artist cape? What am I drawn to? What do I care about?
This questioning — especially in the presence of a compassionate witness — can be transformative.
Support at The Green Room
At The Green Room, we offer confidential psychological counseling for artists, including those navigating identity shifts, burnout, creative block, or transitions in career or self-concept. Whether you're grieving a lost part of yourself or discovering a new one, these sessions offer space to be seen — without needing to perform.
Sessions are available in English or German, online or in-person.
Final Thought
“Who am I, when I am not doing the thing I’ve built my whole self around?”
If this question resonates with you, you are not alone. You are not broken.
You are in a process of becoming.
Author: Heather O’Donnell - psychologist, artistic-systemic therapist and founding director of TGR The Green Room