Identification is a psychological process whereby the individual assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed wholly or partially by the model that other provides.
[3] The question was taken up again psychoanalytically in Ferenczi's article "Introjection and Transference" (1909),[4] 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.
"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".
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.
[8] "By and large, psychoanalysts grant the importance and centrality of primary identification, even though...the concept varies 'according to each author and his ideas, its meaning in consequence being far from precise' (Etchegoyen 1985)".
[13] Otto Fenichel would go on to emphasize how "trial identifications for the purposes of empathy play a basic part in normal object relationships.
[14] Object relations theory would subsequently highlight the use of "trial identification with the patient in the session"[15] as part of the growing technique of analysing from the countertransference.
Mainstream analytic thought broadly agrees that interpretation took effect "by utilizing positive transference and transitory identifications with the analyst".
[21] Most Lacanians have subsequently echoed his distrust of "the view of psychoanalysis that relies on identification with the analyst as a central curative factor".
Marion Milner has argued that "terminal identification" can be most acute in those analysands who go on to become therapists themselves: "by the mere fact of becoming analysts we have succeeded in bypassing an experience which our patients have to go through.