It is in relation to a sense of a tangible future that the shaming dimension of Americanization most directly threatens the mobility and integration of the assimilation-aspiring "ethnic American" of South and East European origin or ancestry. Uncertainty about one's future precipitates uncertainty about one's modes of conflict resolution that are bound up with a particular sense of future, and thereby threatens to reawaken the conflicts anew. This "identity crisis" exists for many members of all groups that have labeled themselves as "ethnic," as well as others that have been excluded from this rubric by those who now seek to overdefine themselves. Remarks here are confined to Slovak-Americans, with whom was done one and one-half years of field research in the industrial region of Western Pennsylvania, focusing on a third and fourth generation family analysis. The formulation proposed in this paper would suggest that as a consequence of socialization, individual, and experience in the world beyond the family, ambivalence would still be very much present. As for the problem of marginal status, the current assertations of "ethnic pride" and the beginnings of "ethnic power" movements would certainly suggest that socioeconomic and cultural marginality are not issues of the past. Thus, for the present generation the phenomenology of the ego would be little changed from earlier generations. (Author/JM)