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.
Development
1900
introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
1921
developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
In The Ego and the Id (1923);Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921);Mourning and Melancholia (1917)
Relations
- 1900 introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1921 developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
Works
- 1900
Freud's book on dreams, issued by Deuticke in November 1899 with the imprint date 1900, argues that a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. It sets out a method of interpreting dreams through the dreamer's associations and distinguishes the manifest content of a dream from the latent dream-thoughts. The dream-work turns the latter into the former through condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The seventh chapter proposes a model of the psychical apparatus made up of the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, with a censorship between them and two modes of functioning, the primary and the secondary process. The book is also the first printed statement of the theme Freud later named the Oedipus complex. Freud enlarged it in many later editions.
- 1917
Freud compares melancholia with normal mourning. In both the loved object is lost and interest in the world is withdrawn, but only in melancholia is self-regard lowered, so that the patient reproaches and reviles himself. Freud reads these self-reproaches as reproaches against a loved object, shifted back onto the patient’s own ego. Where the object choice rested on a narcissistic basis, the libido withdrawn from the lost object is drawn into the ego and used to set up an identification with it, so that the shadow of the object falls upon the ego. A critical agency in the ego, the forerunner of the super-ego, then treats the ego as the forsaken object. The paper also discusses ambivalence, the risk of suicide, and mania as a triumph over the lost object.
- 1921
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Freud’s study of group psychology. Starting from the accounts of crowds given by Le Bon and McDougall, he argues that what binds the members of a group together, and binds them to their leader, is libido diverted from its sexual aims. He takes the church and the army as examples of artificial groups held together by love for a leader. He develops the concept of identification as the earliest emotional tie to another person, and compares being in love and hypnosis to group formation: in each, an object is put in place of the ego ideal. A group is then a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in place of their ego ideal and so have identified with one another. Freud links the leader to the father of the primal horde, and separates the ego ideal from the ego as a differentiating grade within it.
- 1923
The book in which Freud sets out his structural model of the mind. Since much of the ego is itself unconscious, the division conscious/unconscious is not enough. Freud distinguishes the id, a term he takes from Georg Groddeck, as the reservoir of the drives; the ego, the part of the id modified by the influence of the external world, first and foremost a bodily ego; and the super-ego or ego ideal, formed by identification with the parents as the heir of the Oedipus complex. He restates the dualism of life drives and death drives, discusses fusion and defusion of the drives, the unconscious sense of guilt and the negative therapeutic reaction, and ends with the ego as a poor creature serving three masters: the external world, the libido of the id and the severity of the super-ego.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Interpretation of Dreams1900Evidence for a relation
- The Ego and the Id1923Evidence for a relation
- Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego1921Evidence for a relation
- Mourning and Melancholia1917Evidence for a relation