The standard way to escape is to identify with something powerful, as in the classical resolution of the Oedipal situation where the son identifies with the father. The something powerful may be the Father, the Mother, the Group, the Generalized Other, or God. But at the same time that identity-formation gives us security by telling us who we are, it also gives us an opponent by telling us who we are not. On the one hand, this is a logical point. Omne determinatio est negatio, wrote Spinoza.
Every identity implies a negation.
To affirm what we are is to deny what we are not. At another level, the construction of identity carries with it the opportunity for projection. If our emotions were in turmoil before we identified with the Good Parent, the identification does not cool the fires of the cauldron of rages, fears, envies, and violent fantasies that seethe within us. Such neo-Freudian pessimism is reinforced from a somewhat different direction by a new book Danny Sheehan gave Ron Robertson for his birthday, which Roger and I read, The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington, a former chairman of the National Security Council. According to Huntington, our identity gives us enemies because our values are the norms of the civilization we belong to.