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The concept of identification is central to the formations of groups. According to Freud, identification is the earliest expression of love for another person. Engaged in this psychological process we become like another. We model ourselves after someone we hold in high esteem.
In infancy, a parent or caregiver is taken as a model after which the child molds him or herself. The child internalizes aspects of this other person, their way of meeting challenges, of relating to the external world and to others. Identification, as mental action carries the quality of devouring another or parts of them. It can sometimes be the individual’s response to the loss of a connection, a way of taking another living being into oneself and one’s mind to preserve it mentally. For example, a child grief-stricken by the death of a puppy may then declare that now he is the pup, himself, and begin to crawl around on all fours.
In adolescence, an individual yearns to find idols to identify with and emulate in order to help negotiate the challenges of transitioning to adulthood. Psychotherapist Nancy McWilliams remarks, “the dissatisfaction of contemporary teenagers with the heroes now offered by Western culture has been connected by some psychoanalytic observers with the alarming increase in adolescent suicides over recent decades.” Heroes or idols are useful throughout our lives. They give us a way of measuring our own values and refining them against someone we admire.
Intimacy in a marriage or between loving partners provides the opportunity for identifications that are mutually enriching, that facilitate emotional growth and self-actualization. A partner may strive to accumulate within himself qualities of the other: "My spouse has patience and creativity; I want to be like her and also share these personal attributes so this power will be inside me."
Psychotherapy, too, is in large part the rethinking of identifications with family that served a useful function in childhood by resolving conflicts, but have since outlived their purpose and become problematic in adulthood. McWilliams adds, “ The capacity of human beings to identify with new love objects [such as a therapist through the intense emotional tie of transference] is probably the main vehicle through which people recover from emotional suffering and the main means by which psychotherapy of any kind achieves change.”
Most importantly, identification is central to group formations. “We are Americans; We are Christians. We are Sunni Muslims.” Groups are organized around the same intense emotional tie, rooted in the phenomenon of loving. Love is the psychological energy that binds group members together. A century ago in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud described this magnetism that lay behind the “riddle of groups” in relation to the army and church. Many of these same ideas about groups can be applied to other kinds of collective formations today– whether racial, political, religious or nationalistic.
Members of such groups identify with one another by together directing their love toward the same object, a shared leader, or toward a cherished cause. The collective taking in of a leader or common ideal, in turn, creates a shared identification and likeness of feeling among the followers in a group. Members identify with the leader or ideology (a belief system such as democracy or Christianity) and also with one another through their devotion. In other words, groups identification work in two directions: one hierarchical between leader and follower and the other laterally between group members.
Historical developments in technology have always had a big impact on group identifications. For instance, the invention of telephones and wireless radio intensified the methods of political propaganda during WWI and the motion picture camera in the 1930s was useful for the German propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl. Yet the means of facilitating group identifications took huge strides with the development of the internet and social media enabling terrorist groups such as ISIS to mobilize sophisticated propaganda in many languages in order to make converts. Women, themselves, who have joined ISIS run the ground level operations for new female recruits and teach women how to respond to protests from family or friends about enrolling in the organization. They advise on what clothes to wear and promote the value of giving birth to a holy warrior. This increases the horizontal axis of identifications. The Caliph is the symbol most often used by ISIS for the reinforcement of solidarity and rouses powerful feelings of loss and the desire for reclamation. In this way, imagery of the Caliphate contributes to the vertical axis of identifications and the shared vision of recreating this Islamic across Iraq, Syria and beyond.
Social psychologist Erich Fromm called these emotional bonds of groups “primary ties” that give a person security and feeling of belonging, what he described as a “unity with the world outside oneself.” Given solidarity with others in a group the individual is no longer morally alone but tends toward more certainty of his convictions and more confidence in his place within the larger structure of social relations. Yet solidarity with the group often requires one to relinquish a large degree of independent thought and individual initiative.
Identification is a normal aspect of psychological development but becomes problematic under some circumstances. While identification itself is a neutral mental process, it can have helpful or harmful effects depending on who or what is taken as the object of the identification. McWilliams explains that identification can be “a taking in of what is loved and a defensive becoming like what is feared.” It can serve defensive functions, in that it may be motivated by the need to avoid anxiety, shame, grief or other painful emotions. It can be used as a way of restoring a threatened sense of self or bolstering fragile self-esteem. This is a psychological process Anna Freud called “identification with the aggressor.”
Observations and empirical research show that sometimes under conditions of threat, fear or abuse a person will try to master their pain by taking on the psychological attributes of their abuser. For example, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim described how in Nazi concentration camps some inmates came to identify with their SS guards and appropriated the aggression of these hostile figures as a mode of surviving the humiliation endured at their hands. They then directed the enmity at other inmates. In this way, an experience of assault is assimilated by identifying with the aggressor. The internalized hurt is directed outward, turned back and projected onto the outside world. The individual transforms himself from the one threatened—to the one making the threat. The victim becomes the assailant and then inflicts abuse on others. A passive position in regard to a painful or traumatic offense is transformed into an active one.
Identification with the aggressor can shape the behavior of nations or large groups, in addition to individuals. Having endured persecution, a group responds by persecuting another more vulnerable collective of people. Revenge is wrought on the substitute. Yesterday’s oppressed then becomes today’s oppressor.
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References
McWilliams, Nancy. Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, Second Edition: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process. New York: Guilford Press, 1994.
