Concept
Identification
The process by which a subject takes on a feature, an attitude or the whole of another person and is transformed after that model. In Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921) Freud called it the earliest expression of an emotional tie to another, and described how it can take the place of a lost or abandoned object, as in melancholia. In Das Ich und das Es (1923) he made identifications with abandoned objects, and above all with the parents at the end of the Oedipus complex, the stuff of which the ego's character and the super-ego are built.
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 4
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1900 Freud first gave identification a psychoanalytic meaning in Die Traumdeutung, where hysterical identification, putting oneself in another's place on the ground of a shared unconscious element, explains a patient's dream and the spread of symptoms among patients.
developed by
- Sigmund Freud 1921 After describing narcissistic identification with the lost object in melancholia (1917), Freud devotes a chapter of Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse to identification as the earliest emotional tie to another person, distinguishing three forms of it; in 1923 he holds that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes.