Identification in Psychology

IDENTIFICATION IN PSYCHOLOGY (from French identification), the identification of oneself with another being; one of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Processes of identification manifest themselves particularly clearly in dreams, where they represent a partial form of condensation, i.e., the combination in a single image of the features of several objects. Indeed, in a dream it sometimes happens that the sleeper sees himself in forms and situations peculiar to other people, as if absorbing the latter into his personality. Sometimes identification is complete, sometimes partial, but it always represents a process of complete fusion in which both identified persons, as if covering each other (like two images taken on the same spot of a photographic plate), are directly experienced as a single "ego". Most often, identification unites the personality of the sleeper with people toward whom he has certain affective relations, who possess traits and properties pleasant or hateful to him in himself, or who perform actions of which the subject dreams or has dreamed in waking life. Like other mechanisms of dreams, identification finds a place in the genesis of certain neurotic symptoms and in the picture of psychoses such as schizophrenia (the construction of delusions, hallucinations). Much more controversial is the role assigned by Freud to identification in the origin of the so-called Oedipus complex, which determines, in his opinion, the psychological development of every child and youth. A small boy, Freud says, shows a special interest in his father: he would like to become like him, to be in his place in all cases. The father is his ideal, a person whom he would like to replace. Being erotically attached to the mother, the child eventually notices that the father stands in his way, and from this time on his identification takes on a hostile shade, becoming equivalent to the desire to destroy the father and take his place with the mother. The child, however, identifies himself not only with the father, but also with the mother, and later, when he grows up, with other adults, especially educators, beloved heroes, etc. By identifying himself with them, the developing personality gradually forms his "superego", or "ideal ego", which, on the basis of identification with surrounding people, absorbs the moral principles and social feelings common to the given environment, forming what is called the conscience of the personality. Unconscious identification lies at the basis of any voluntary submission: the hypnotized to the hypnotist, the follower to the leader, etc. In general, the doctrine of identification is undoubtedly a deepening of our knowledge of certain psychopathic processes, but its excessively broad extension to the entire field of genetic and social psychology must be limited and supplemented by other explanatory principles of a sociological order.