Identification (psychology)

Identification is a psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, by the model the other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified. The roots of the concept can be found in Freud's writings. The three most prominent concepts of identification as described by Freud are: primary identification, narcissistic (secondary) identification and partial (secondary) identification.

While "in the psychoanalytic literature there is agreement that the core meaning of identification is simple - to be like or to become like another", it has also been adjudged '"the most perplexing clinical/theoretical area" in psychoanalysis'.

Freud first raised the matter of identification (German: Identifizierung) in 1897, in connection with the illness or death of one's parents, and the response "to punish oneself in a hysterical fashion...with the same states [of illness] that they have had. The identification which occurs here is, as we can see, nothing other than a mode of thinking". The question was taken up again psychoanalytically "in Ferenczi's article, 'Introjection and Transference', dating from 1909", but it was in the decade between "On Narcissism" (1914) and "The Ego and the Id" (1923) that Freud made his most detailed and intensive study of the concept.

Freud distinguished three main kinds of identification. "First, identification is the original form of emotional tie with an object; secondly, in a regressive way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal object-tie...and thirdly, it may arise with any new perception of a common quality which is shared with some other person".

Primary identification is the original and primitive form of emotional attachment to something or someone prior to any relations with other persons or objects: "an individual's first and most important identification, his identification with the father in his own personal prehistory...with the parents". 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.

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