Identification in Psychoanalysis

A Comprehensive Introduction

Jean Florence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367722487
• eBook ISBN: 9781000365047
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This fascinating book offers an in-depth exploration of the gradual development of the concept of identification as it has evolved in the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis.

Featuring a detailed review of the key Freudian texts, referencing them in their original German, this volume demonstrates how psychoanalysis sheds light on the richness and complexity of the identification process in human psychology, at both the individual and collective levels. The author closely follows the various reformulations of the theory – undertaken by Freud in the course of three different periods – and contextualises them within her clinical experience with various pathologies and her observations of the development of individuals, revealing throughout the great extent to which this fundamental process is unconscious.

Providing a critical examination of a fundamental Freudian concept, this volume is not only a teaching manual serving specifically to train psychoanalysts and psychotherapists but is also an important read for anyone interested in human sciences, philosophy and the history of psychoanalysis.

II Identification and narcissism

As our reading continues, the question of identification becomes more complex and branches out in different directions. The first discussions of the concept, dealing with the hysteric’s particular relation to his love objects and to sexual rivalry, extends to include human love life in general, whether it be that of the hysteric, the pervert or the normal subject. The analysis of the identification process in dream-work, whose relation to the process of symptom formation we already examined, leads to the elaboration of a metapsychology, a systematic theory of all these psychic processes. Finally, advances in the practice of analysis and new analytic material stemming from the analysis of phobias, obsessional neuronal and psychoses associate the work of identification with ambivalence, totemism, castration and death.

This complexity makes it more and more difficult to establish a chronological sequence of texts on identification. Repetitions, return to earlier texts, hesitation and anticipation typical of any clinical-theoretical reflection cause some confusion and make it improbable that a well-ordered chronology can be restored.

The present chapter examines an exceptional moment in the Freudian elaboration: the passage from the first topography to the second,¹ a transformation of the conceptual structure of psychoanalytic theory dictated by the advent of new experiments, hypotheses and areas of interest. Therefore, we shall associate texts that were sometimes published at different periods but are closely related in their subject matter.

Identification, orality and object-choice

Freud’s reflection on human sexuality reached its most detailed development in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905. The numerous new versions of this text, re-edited one after the other between 1905 and 1925, testify to the importance Freud attached to this central theme of psychoanalysis.

The investigation of sexual development introduces a new context in which to define the concept of identification: the context of a genetic pattern of psychosexual development. In his attempt to reconstitute this genesis of sexuality, Freud needs the appropriate concepts: first, he must define the concept of instinct itself, a definition which produces a constellation of related concepts: source, energy, aim, object. This construction must make it possible to conceptualise what is intermediary (between the biological and the psychical), to find the language that can best express approximately this “emotional” character of sexuality as a pathway in the historisation of the subject. The use of terms like stages and phases can cover over what occurs in the elaboration of the theory: that is, the fortuitous nature of instinctual impulses dispersed in their partial and fragmented searches, the construction of an erotogenic body bit by bit, the precarious unification of impulses into adult sexual organisation. It is within the tentative conceptual reconstruction of these phases and psychical locations of sexuality that the concept of identification was inserted in a different theoretical space than dream and hysteria.

A genealogy of identification

A passage added to the second essay (“Infantile Sexuality”) in 1915 defines the contours of this space and confirms the gap beginning to appear between the first topography and the second.

We shall give the name of “pregenital” to organizations of sexual life in which the genital zones have not yet taken over their predominant part. . .. The first of these is the oral or, as it might be called, cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization. Here sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food; nor are opposite currents within the activity differentiated. The object of both activities is the same; the sexual aim consists in incorporation of the object – the prototype of a process which, in the form of identification, is later to play such an important psychological part. A relic of this constructed phase of organization, which is forced upon our notice by pathology, may be seen in thumb-sucking, in which the sexual activity, detached from the nutritive activity, has substituted for the extraneous object one situated in the subject’s own body.²

These lines deserve our complete attention. They seriously complicate the questions examined so far and point to the polymorphous, multi-dimensional character of identification. This term, used in the theory as an explanatory concept – one of many mechanisms – is now considered on its own, in its genesis; its genealogy is revealed. Indeed, from this point on, Freud’s attention turns more and more to questions of genesis, particularly the genesis of the ego. The text we just quoted illustrates this preoccupation with beginnings, indicated by an investigation of “infancy”: the infancy of sexuality, of the personality, of processes. Let us look at some key terms.

When he speaks of the pregenital organisation of sexual life, he is referring to a phase when “the genital zones have not yet taken over their predominant part”.³ He adds: “We have hitherto identified two such organizations, which almost seem as though they were harking back to early animal forms of life”. This remark indicates interest in a biological perspective. Indeed, in Three Essays, Freud attempts to place biology in perspective, and it is thanks to the inevitable questioning prompted by considering the role of instincts that he succeeds in identifying the specific object of psychoanalysis: sexuality as the driving force of psychic genesis, as a departure from biology. The question of the nature of identification is closely linked to this debate, and the debate finds, in the question of identification, the key element and strategic sphere of its analysis. But to pre-empt a simplistic understanding of the notion of genesis, Freud is careful to explain how he came to postulate it.

The study, with the help of psycho-analysis, of the inhibitions and disturbances of this process of development enables us to recognize abortive beginnings and preliminary stages of a firm organization of the component instincts such as this – preliminary stages which themselves constitute a sexual regime of a sort.⁴

What exactly is the pregenital organisation called oral? It is the first level of organisation in which an instinct can be recognised as such: that is, “organised” into source, energy, object, aim – terms defined in the first essay. This is the foundation of a sort of “sexual regime”: something starts to operate, to make itself heard, to take shape, to take hold. A mythic moment when that which will be a “body” is drafted out of the dispersion of erotogenic zones and the thrust of desire. Feeding behaviour and sexual behaviour are distinct entities in law but not in fact. They have only one path open to them: the mouth – which is also the channel of breath and of cries. This is a cannibalistic phase because what is consumed – what emerging sexuality takes in and what serves to sexualise vital nourishment – is originally flesh: the breast with its milk. Two different activities, but the object of one is also the object of the other. The aim of feeding is, of course, absorption, which for a time eliminates the pressure of hunger; the sexual aim (Freud does not allude to a feeding aim, which is obvious) is incorporation of the object. Is there any difference between these two aims?

The only answer Freud provides is found in an opposition: “the incorporation of the object – the prototype of a process which, in the form of identification, is later to play such an important psychological part”. What is specifically sexual in incorporation is the psychical component being prepared. Thus, incorporation functions in two modes – a feeding mode and a sexual mode – which can only be recognised as such through reference to what will happen later. It is clear to see here the ambiguous status of this oral instinctual regime: sexual and not yet sexual, the status of a pre-figuration, a prototype, a model. Indeed, Freud notes the “virtual” (Fiktive) existence of this phase of organisation, which has no other purpose than to confer meaning to psychopathological phenomena.

If we consider the same phase from the perspective of the residue it leaves – that is, sucking – we have a better idea of the gap opened between the feeding function and the sexual function. The sucked thumb, which acts like a substitute for the breast, consecrates, we might say, the definite loss of the object common to both activities and, by separating them, initiates the series of specifically sexual objects, starting with a part of one’s own body. There is layering (Anlehnung)⁵ of the sexual on the non-sexual based on an initial communality of the object, but this communality has to be broken in order for the sexual as such to emerge (in the form of auto-eroticism): that is, to set in motion the process of psychic development, whose onset is signalled by the production of a substitute. In other words, the “psychical” or the “sexual” is the play of substitution as an elaboration of the loss of the object.

This being so, could we not hazard the following interpretation: does not psychic activity which follows the oral stage receive from this initial mode of functioning the imprint of its “cannibalistic” destiny? To love is to devour. To love is to assimilate the object. These could be the mottos of oral-phase love and sexual activity in its primitive form. This is the sense to be made of the relation of the so-called prototypic process to a later process. Although all activities invoked in loving retain the mark of orality, identification appears to be a psychic elaboration of oral sexuality: it “oralises” or “cannibalises” the love object. When seeing, feeling, touching, caressing and speaking are sexualised, they serve this incorporative sexual purpose. Thus, psychic cannibalism may well be the original but also the permanent objective, leaving its archaic mark on the movement of subsequent stages of organisation. All subsequent identifications belonging to more elaborate sexual systems are destined to contain this devouring tendency.

But this passage from the second essay is itself a foreshadowing: it points to an orientation in the research as if by a flash of lightning. But nothing in the theoretical context of Three Essays allows any productive development of this idea of archaic identification.

The work of puberty

At the other end of libidinal development, the function of puberty is to organise the polymorphous structure of the partial organisations of sexual impulses. Puberty is a period when decisive transformations occur, reorganisations ushering in adult sexuality. This is how Freud summarises the trajectory followed by sexuality:

At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sexual object outside of the infant’s own body in the shape of his mother’s breast. It is only later that the instinct loses that object, just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs. As a rule the sexual instinct then becomes auto-erotic, and not until the period of latency has been passed through is the original relation restored. There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at his mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.⁶

Finding the sexual object is, therefore, a rediscovery. This succinct formulation provides the key to understanding how sexuality develops. The unfolding of this development will depend on the vicissitudes involved in the process of choosing the object. The “original” choice must be repeated, and puberty is the time of this deferred repetition. The choice of the object occurs in two stages.⁷ The first time, the object was “given”:⁸ the child takes the breast and incorporates it; he gives it up through a separation brought about by a certain totalisation based on the organisation of the visual field: an image of the other takes the place of the dispersed functioning of auto-eroticism. The work of puberty consists of taking back the object, finding the lost object (partial object before totalisation). To rediscover the necessary object, the subject must recover the lost object by performing a series of substitutions. A few pages further on, Freud specifies that the choice of the object

is accomplished at first. .. in the world of ideas; and the sexual life of a maturing youth is almost entirel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Foreword: symptoms, transferences, identifications
• Exergue
• I Identification and symptom formation
• II Identification and narcissism
• III The Oedipus complex and the “institutions” of the ego
• In conclusion
• References
• Index