"Identity is the crisis," sang Poly Styrene. "Can't you see? Identity; identity." An incisive critique of the plastic society of '70s Britain, to be sure, but sadly of little assistance to the DDC editors when it came to resolving a little situation that we came across in the vicinity of 111.82 Unity (under 111.8 Classical properties of being in 110 Metaphysics), which is indexed by "Identity (Principle of)." This is the place for philosophical works on identity as a general property of things, whether or not those things are people; the philosophical concept of identity applied to the human self is indexed at 126 The self as "Identity (Human)--philosophy." Meanwhile, works on personal identity written from the perspective of psychology are classed at 155.2 Individual psychology, which is indexed (among other terms) simply by "Identity (Human)" with no further subdivision. We spotted at least two problems here: first, that the number for interdisciplinary works on personal identity is incorrectly specified in the Relative Index as 155.2; and second, that the occurrence of the parenthetical qualifier "(Human)" erroneously gives the impression that the "Identity" indexed at 126 and 155.2 is a completely different concept from the "Identity" indexed at 111.82. The results of our rethink are as follows: index 111.82 with "Identity--philosophy"; 126 with "Identity--philosophy--humans"; and 155.2 with "Identity--psychology." Make sense? Oh, and if you're wondering why it suddenly occurred to us to do this -- well, we've just mapped the LC subject heading "Identity (Philosophical concept) in art" to 704.949126, and had to come up with our own Relative Index term for the new built number. Which, after the dust settles, will be (drum roll, please) ... "Identity--philosophy--humans--art representation." We'll leave the last word to Poly: "Clear as crystal. How do you feel now? I want to know ..."
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