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Abstract
Identification as a psychological concept is widely used in psychology and in social science. This use relies on an ordinary understanding of what identification is, and this understanding has itself been influenced by psychoanalysis. The concept is, however, in need of philosophical exploration. Central to its use is the idea of character, its nature and its development, which like identification itself is under-theorized. I use Richard Wollheim's philosophical analysis of identification in terms of the imagination, to trace a path from ordinary psychology's conception of characterological identification to the psychoanalytic one. I link this to a short discussion of character as a conception of the self available to reflection. Making reference to some psychoanalytic case material, I defend psychoanalysis’ version of identification and its applicability in psychology and the social sciences.
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Notes
Notes
[1] I discuss philosophical attitudes to psychoanalysis in the Introduction to Braddock and Lacewing (Citation2007).
[2] The imagination is central to Wollheim's analysis of Freud's theory as a whole; see, e.g., Wollheim (Citation1979). Other advocates of this view include Castoriadis (Citation1997). Freud's own use of the concept is unsystematic.
[3] Identification is also said to occur with fictional, mythical, or dead, figures. A further form is “social” identification between an individual and a group.
[4] Nothing in my argument depends on distinguishing “personality” and “character.”
[5] Psychoanalysis theorizes the unconscious mind as dynamically organized in the service of psychic defense against psychic pain. I deal here only with Freud's theory and its Kleinian development (notably the concept of “unconscious fantasy”). I employ Wollheim's re-working of this as the thesis of the “archaic theory of the mind” (see section 4).
[6] For iconicity as a property of mental states see Wollheim (Citation1984, pp. 62–65). The concept is not fully developed however.
[7] Critical exposition is too large a task for the present paper. Wollheim's thesis of central imagining forms part of a debate about the imagination inaugurated by Williams (Citation1966/1976).
[8] See Budd (Citation1989, pp. 100–101) for some remarks on Wittgenstein's use of the term. The notion is a methodological one; a counterpart is an external situation whose structure can be objectively described, providing an observational vocabulary for talking about a mental activity (such as central imagining).
[9] “Empathic” is used descriptively here with no commitment to the idea of “empathy” (a concept that Wollheim does not in any case discuss).
[10] This is not because the feelings themselves are imaginary but because they are experienced under the rule-governed activity of imagining.
[11] This is not a behaviorist claim; a subject's character dispositions may be manifest in the thoughts that influence her actions.
[12] This inaccessibility might be explained as the unreflectiveness of young children or the later unreflectiveness of habit. Whether this can account for some forms of identification is immaterial to the argument here; my contention is that it is not enough for all forms of identification.
[13] In abuse the dissonance is not so evidently with the abuser's interests as with what he is in a position to know about its effects, which he intentionally brings about. What needs explaining is how his interests are met by intentionally causing the same suffering in his victim. The (psychoanalytic) explanation of “identification with the aggressor” is merely a descriptive term for the psychic defense mechanism in which anxiety provoked by real or threatened aggression is mastered by identifying with the source of the attack. This in turn requires clarification in terms of central imagining.
[14] On the politics of identity and recognition see Taylor (Citation1992); Honneth (Citation1995).
[15] For the contrast between “accidental” inaccessibility to conscious awareness and “non-accidental” or minimal inaccessibility of mental states rendered unconscious through repression, see Gardner, (Citation1993, pp. 89, 185).
[16] The only source that Freud himself refers to is its use by the anthropologist Robertson Smith, writing in 1885 (Freud, Citation1921/1990, p. 110).
[17] It is in Mourning and melancholia (1917/1990) that Freud has most to say about what he thinks actually happens in identification as a process (see section 5).
[18] Freud's thesis is given here without thereby endorsing it.
[19] Here identification involves Leonardo centrally imagining himself with the repertoire of characteristics of his mother which he has taken over for himself. This modification of the original typology of central imagining is an intelligible addition to the account: we may see the little boy Leonardo as daydreaming about his mother, and then coming to take over her repertoire for himself.
[20] See Wollheim (Citation1979, 1999). In ordinary conscious mental life unconscious fantasy can only find expression indirectly, in symbolic form, in dreams, or as “quasi-manifestation” (Gardner, Citation1993, pp. 218–220).
[21] “Thinking” here means intentional mental activity, conscious or unconscious. Corporeal representations of the mental are unconscious, and only find symbolic expression in normal waking mental life.
[22] This is so whether the Oedipus complex is explained in terms of rivalry with one parent for the love of the other, or as Freud also suggests, in terms of the incest taboo and castration anxiety.
[23] This point is due to an anonymous referee.
[24] There are, however, degrees of normal identification with the lost person, which I leave to one side for clarity.
[25] The critical agency at this stage is still conceived as the ego-ideal, but later becomes the superego.
[26] The theoretical roots of object relations theory are complex, but the capacity for “object-relating” in the British clinical tradition belongs to subjectivity. Inter-subjectivity, as the capacity for relating subject-to-subject, is an achievement (the Kleinian “depressive position”). The two earliest object relations, for Freud, are instinctual gratification and dependence.
[27] The philosophical treatment of identity in this sense is distinguished from the metaphysical identity of persons by Velleman (Citation2006, pp. 2–5). Informally, the notions of a person's “identity” and their “self-conception” are equivalent; at least one use of “identity” is to denote the qualities which make up her self-conception as the very person she is. Velleman (Citation2006, p. 356) also (briefly) treats “identity” in this sense as “self-conception” or “self-image,” understood as the subject's “reflexive representations.”
[28] For the orienting role of emotional states see Lacewing (Citation2004).
[29] I argue elsewhere that psychoanalytic interpretation is continuous with interpretation as analysed by Taylor (Citation1971) (Braddock, Citation2006).
[30] This view of the countertransference is not shared by all psychoanalytic schools; it does however characterize the British object relations school.
[31] Here, “introject” and “project” can be taken non-technically as meaning “in one's mind” and “back out in the world,” the difference roughly between an intentional object and a real object.
[32] The importance of the repertoire here was pointed out to me by David Mayers.
[33] Although here the transference object relation is experienced by the analyst as part of her counter-transference, it is not itself part of the transference. Transference belongs to the patient's experience, not to the analyst, who may have a quite different experience, or even no experience of her own at all, in reaction to it. Here, the analyst is brought by her patient's unresponsiveness to centrally imagine the mother, and to feel useless in the way the mother did, in trying to get through to the immobilized child.
[34] Accordingly, one would expect intimations of this from the description of the analyst's counter-transference. Discerning these is a matter of interpretation and requires more exposition and defense than can be gone into here.
[35] Psychoanalysis holds that the mind is never free of the archaic mode of thinking; the mind always operates under both the Reality and the Pleasure principles (Freud, Citation1911/1990).
[36] This is not to deny that individual analytic philosophers have attached a value to psychoanalysis and have investigated and employed it (see note 1).