Identification (psychology)

Primary identification is the original and primitive form of emotional attachment to something or someone prior to any relations with other persons or objects:[6] "an individual's first and most important identification, his identification with the father in his own personal prehistory...with the parents".[7] This means that when a baby is born he is not capable of making a distinction between himself and important others. The baby has an emotional attachment with his parents and experiences his parents as a part of himself. "The breast is part of me, I am the breast".

During this process of identification children adopt unconsciously the characteristics of their parents and begin to associate themselves with and copy the behavior of their parents. Freud remarked that identification should be distinguished from imitation, which is a voluntary and conscious act. Because of this process of emotional attachment a child will develop a super ego that has similarities to the moral values and guidelines by which the parents live their lives. By this process children become a great deal like their parents and this facilitates learning to live in the world and culture to which they are born.[8]

"By and large, psychoanalysts grant the importance and centrality of primary identification, even though...the concept varies 'according to each author and his ideas, its meaning in consequence being far from precise' (Etchegoyen 1985)".[9]

Narcissistic identification is the form of identification following abandonment or loss of an object. This experience of loss starts at a very young age.[6] An example: wearing the clothes or jewellery of a deceased loved one.[10] In "Mourning and Melancholia" Freud, having "shown that identification is a preliminary stage of object-choice", argued that the experience of loss sets in motion a regressive process that "served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object".[11] In "The Ego and the Id", he went on to maintain that "this kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its 'character'".[12]

Lacan, in his theory of the Imaginary, would develop the latter point into his view of "the ego is constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications"[13] - part of his opposition to any concept of an "autonomous" and conflict-free ego.

Partial identification is based on the perception of a special quality of another person.[6] This quality or ideal is often represented in a "leader figure" who is identified with. For example: the young boy identifies with the strong muscles of an older neighbour boy. Next to identification with the leader, people identify with others because they feel they have something in common. For example: a group of people who like the same music. This mechanism plays an important role in the formation of groups. It contributes to the development of character and the ego is formed by identification with a group (group norms). Partial identification promotes the social life of persons who will be able to identify with one another through this common bond to one another, instead of considering someone as a rival.[8]

Freud went on to indicate the way "a path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life".[14] Otto Fenichel would go on to emphasize how "trial identifications for the purposes of empathy play a basic part in normal object relationships. They can be studied especially in analyzing the psychoanalyst's ways of working".[15] Object relations theory would subsequently highlight the use of "trial identification with the patient in the session"[16] as part of the growing technique of analysing from the countertransference.