GeistHaus

Object Relations

Identification

Most of us can hear a parent’s voice coming out of our own mouth. A turn of phrase, a way of sighing at the dishes, a habit of going quiet when angry: at some point these belonged to someone else, and now they are ours. Just as often, people build parts of their lives around not being like someone. “I will never treat my kids the way my father treated me” can organize a whole career, a marriage, a style of parenting.

Psychoanalysis calls the first process identification: becoming like another person, in feeling, attitude or behavior, by taking something of them into yourself so that it changes who you are. The second, the deliberate or half-deliberate effort to be unlike someone, is often called counter-identification or disidentification. Both are ways the people in our lives become part of the structure of the self.

In technical terms, identification is one of the main forms of internalization, the family of processes by which relationships with other people are turned into lasting features of the mind. Freud called identification the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person (Freud, 1921), and argued that the ego, our organized sense of self, is built up in large part out of the people it has loved and lost (Freud, 1923). Later writers, especially Roy Schafer (1968) and W. W. Meissner (1981), worked hard to separate identification from its near neighbors, introjection and incorporation.

Identification is not a disorder or a defense in itself. Everyone does it, all the time; it is how children learn to be people and how adults keep learning. It becomes interesting, and sometimes painful, when it happens outside awareness, when it binds us to someone who hurt us, or when the effort to be unlike someone quietly reproduces them.

Core Ideas

Identification
Modeling yourself on another person so that their qualities become your own and feel like you. The result is a change in the self, not just a memory of the other.
Introjection
Taking in another person as a presence inside you, an inner figure you still relate to: the critical voice that sounds like your mother, the coach you still argue with. The other remains “other” inside.
Incorporation
The most primitive, bodily version of taking in, modeled on eating and swallowing. Mostly a theoretical and developmental idea.
Counter-identification or disidentification
Defining yourself by contrast with someone: deliberately becoming their opposite, or refusing a resemblance.
Selective identification
Taking in some qualities of a person and not others, so that the self becomes a mosaic of borrowed and transformed pieces.

Two points recur across schools. First, we identify with relationships, not only with people. A child who was regularly shamed may later find themselves shaming others, or shaming themselves, because what was absorbed was the whole scene: a shamer, a shamed one, and the feeling between them (see dyads and internal objects). Second, identification is selective and transforming. Healthy identity is not a photocopy of anyone; it is a synthesis.

How It Shows Up

How Different Thinkers See It

Sigmund Freud: Loss, Love and the Building of the Ego

Freud came at identification from several angles. In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) he noticed that the harsh self-reproaches of melancholic people often fit a lost loved one better than the sufferer. Unable to let the person go, the mourner sets the lost person up inside the ego and then rages at them there. His famous image was that “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.”

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) he gave identification its most general role: it is the earliest form of emotional tie to another person, it can substitute for a love relationship that has been given up, and it can arise from noticing something shared with someone else, which is part of how groups bind together around a leader. Two years later, in The Ego and the Id (1923), he proposed that the character of the ego is a record of abandoned attachments, and that the superego, the conscience, forms through identification with the parents.

Sándor Ferenczi: Taking In the One Who Hurts You

Ferenczi coined the term introjection (Ferenczi, 1909) and later described one of the most important and troubling forms of identification. In “Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child” (1933; English translation 1949) he argued that a child overwhelmed by an adult’s abuse cannot fight or flee, and so submits, attunes intensely to the adult’s wishes, and identifies with them, even taking in the adult’s guilt as if it were the child’s own. This helps explain why people who were mistreated often blame themselves.

Anna Freud: Identification With the Aggressor

In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) Anna Freud named identification with the aggressor: meeting a threat by becoming like the threatening person. A child who has been frightened plays at being the frightening thing; a child scolded by a teacher goes home and scolds a younger sibling. By shifting from the passive to the active role, the person turns helplessness into a sense of power. She saw this as a normal step in superego development that becomes a problem when it hardens, so that criticism is reflexively turned outward. Her term and Ferenczi’s overlap but stress different things: Anna Freud emphasized mastery through becoming the aggressor, Ferenczi the victim’s submission and self-blame.

Edith Jacobson and Otto Kernberg: Self- and Object-Images

Ego psychologists and object-relations theorists placed identification inside a developmental account of how images of self and others form. Jacobson (1964) traced how early, merged images of self and mother gradually become distinct, so that mature identification can take in someone’s qualities without blurring the boundary between you and them. Kernberg (1976) proposed a sequence of internalization running from introjection, through identification, to ego identity, the overall organization of all these identifications into a coherent sense of self. When that integration fails, people experience what he called identity diffusion.

Erik Erikson: From Identifications to Identity

Erikson insisted that identity is more than the sum of childhood identifications. In adolescence and young adulthood, he argued, a person selectively keeps, rejects and recombines earlier identifications into something new that also fits their society and their future (Erikson, 1950, 1968). He also described a negative identity: a self built from the very roles a person was warned against becoming, sometimes chosen because it feels more real than an identity imposed from outside (Erikson, 1968). Erikson’s point is a useful corrective to any picture of people as mere copies of their parents.

Roy Schafer and W. W. Meissner: Keeping the Terms Straight

By the 1960s the vocabulary of internalization had become muddled. Schafer’s Aspects of Internalization (1968) separated introjects, which are experienced as presences one relates to, from identifications, which are experienced as part of oneself and change one’s own motives and behavior. Meissner (1970, 1981) built a careful hierarchy in which incorporation is the most primitive and boundary-blurring form, introjection preserves the other as an inner presence, and identification is the most mature, involving an active, selective reshaping of the self. In this view, a harsh inner critic you argue with is an introject; a standard you have truly made your own is an identification.

Ralph Greenson: Disidentifying

In a short, much-cited paper, Greenson (1968) argued that a young boy, whose first and closest identification is with his mother, must “dis-identify” from her and counter-identify with his father to establish a male gender identity. Many later writers, particularly feminist and relational analysts, challenged the gender assumptions of this account. But the broader idea outlived its context: forming a self often requires actively defining yourself against someone, and that process carries its own costs, such as walling off qualities, like tenderness, that got associated with the person you had to be unlike.

Relational and Interpersonal Views

Relational analysts stress that identifications are formed inside relationships and are kept alive by them. Lorna Smith Benjamin’s interpersonal approach (Benjamin, 2003) names three “copy processes”: becoming like an important person, acting as though they are still present, and treating yourself as they treated you. She suggests that these copies are often maintained, without awareness, as a kind of loyalty, a hope that being like the person will finally win their love or approval (see core relational themes).

Same Behavior, Opposite Meanings

One of the most important clinical lessons about identification is that behavior alone does not tell you what it means. The same outward act can carry opposite identificatory meanings:

Counter-identifications have a well-known irony: they keep the person in charge. If your life is organized around being the opposite of your father, he is still setting the terms. And the opposite of a trait often shares its underlying shape. The person who swore never to be controlling like their mother may become controlling about not being controlling, or may avoid any authority at all. This is why the meaning of a resemblance can only really be found by asking the person, and listening to how they tell it.

Examples

These are composite illustrations, not real individuals.

The Voice at Bedtime

A father who promised himself he would be nothing like his short-tempered dad notices, one night, that he has just hissed at his daughter in exactly his father’s tone. He is shaken. Over time he realizes that his vow covered shouting but not the cold withdrawal that followed it, which he does all the time. The disidentification was real, but partial.

Wearing the Cardigan

Months after her mother died, a woman finds she has started doing the crossword every morning, something she always teased her mother about. She also notices that she has become more critical of herself, in phrases that are recognizably her mother’s. One is a loving identification that keeps her mother close; the other, in Freud’s sense, is closer to the lost person set up inside as a critic.

Becoming the Boss

A man who was humiliated by a bullying manager for years is promoted and, to his own dismay, finds himself mocking junior colleagues in meetings. He is not a cruel person; he has, in Anna Freud’s terms, moved from the helpless role to the powerful one in the same old scene.

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

In Personality Styles

Identification runs through every personality style, but some patterns are characteristic. People with a depressive style often carry a critical internalized parent and turn its reproaches on themselves, much as Freud described. A sadistic or bullying pattern can reflect identification with an aggressor. Dependent people may borrow identity from whoever they lean on, and identity built mainly by borrowing can feel fragile, as in Kernberg’s identity diffusion (see differentiation and integration). Narcissistic dynamics often involve identification with an idealized figure, connecting to Kohut’s selfobjects. And everyone’s internal standards and ideals are built substantially out of identifications.

History

Identification entered psychoanalysis gradually. Freud used it early in the study of hysterical symptoms, but it took center stage with “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and The Ego and the Id (1923), which together made identification a building block of the ego and the superego. Ferenczi (1909) had already introduced introjection, and his late work (1933) on the traumatized child’s identification with the aggressor anticipated Anna Freud’s (1936) better-known formulation.

Mid-century ego psychology and early object-relations theory extended the idea into development. Jacobson (1964) linked it to self- and object-images; Erikson (1950, 1968) set it within the lifelong formation of identity; Greenson (1968) gave disidentification a name. Schafer (1968) and Meissner (1970, 1981) then supplied the careful distinctions among incorporation, introjection and identification that most writers still use, and Kernberg (1976) folded them into his model of personality organization. Relational and interpersonal writers, including Benjamin (2003), have since emphasized identifications as living ties, kept up out of loyalty and hope as much as by habit.

Sources