identification

n.

1. 1. The act of identifying.
   2. The state of being identified.
2. (Abbr. ID) Proof or evidence of identity.
3. Psychology. A person's association with or assumption of the qualities, characteristics, or views of another person or group.

The assignment of an identifier such as a username for a person or a name for a computer or network device. See identifier.

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Any means of verifying a bank's customer, for example, the drawer (maker) of a negotiable instrument or the person initiating an electronic funds transfer. Also, any industry assigned number identifying a paying bank (the Aba Transit Number or Check Routing Symbol), or the owner of marketable securities.

1. Bank customer's signature on a check, either as drawer or endorser. Banks have an obligation to examine paid checks for proper endorsement, but this is now done on an exception basis.

2. In electronic transfers of funds, a sending bank's password, called an issuer Key used in place of a bank officer's signature. See also Message Authentication Code.

3. Personal Identification Number (PIN) assigned to a bank account.

4. Biometric identification, a means of identifying bank customers by unique physical characteristics, such as voice, fingerprint, or handwriting. The most promising of these new technologies is signature dynamics, which identifies handwriting.

5. Personal information known by the account holder, such as mother's maiden name, recorded on a Signature Card when a new account is opened.

6. Social Security Number of an individual or federal Taxpayer Identification Number of an organization.

7. Bank Identification Number (BIN).

8. machine readable characters such as the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) line on the bottom edge of checks.

9. Cusip Number.

n. 1. the process of determining the friendly or hostile character of an unknown detected contact.

2. in arms control, the process of determining which nation is responsible for the detected violations of any arms control measure.

3. in ground combat operations, discrimination between recognizable objects as being friendly or enemy, or the name that belongs to the object as a member of a class.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

1. The process of modelling one's behaviour after another individual, usually an older person.

2. A form of direct motivation used by a coach. It involves disguised compliance. For example. a coach using identification may say to the athlete ‘if you care about the team, you will do this for me’. Successful use of identification depends on a positive relationship between a coach and athlete in which the athlete wishes to please the coach.

Identification is an unconscious mental process by which someone makes part of their personality conform to the personality of another, who serves as a model. Described cursorily by Freud in the context of psychopathology, the mechanism of identification has come to refer to a principal mode of relating to others and has been integrated in the processes that constitute the psyche. Identification should be distinguished from imitation, which is a voluntary and conscious act.

The notion of identification, in spite of its novelty and originality in the scientific or psychological vocabulary of the time, first appeared in Freud's writings in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess on December 17, 1896. It has always retained the meaning he gave it then: "I have confirmed, for instance, a long-standing suspicion about the mechanism of agoraphobia in women. You will guess it if you think of prostitutes. It is the repression of the impulse to take the first comer on the streets—envy of the prostitute and identification with her" (1985c, p. 182).

Freud often associated identification and hysterical symptoms with each other in subsequent writings, but he gave the concept a greater role in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), especially in the commentary that follows the dream of the "spiritual butcher," as Jacques Lacan referred to the dream of the dinner party where Freud refers to the wife's identification with a friend and presumed rival (chapter 4). Freud remarks that patients can "suffer as it were for a whole host of others, and to play all the roles in a drama solely out of their own personal resources." The classic definition follows: "[I]dentification is not simple imitation but assimilation on the basis of a similar aetiological pretension; it expresses a resemblance and is derived from a common element which remains in the unconscious" (1900a, p. 150).

There is little doubt for Freud that this "aetiological claim" and "some factor held in common" are sexual in nature. Freud completes his description by demonstrating the dynamic use of identification under cover of another personality or composite formation, through the process of condensation and the use of a shared trait (the einziger Zug that Jacques Lacan translated as "unary trait"), overcome censorship and realize the forbidden infantile wishes in the dream. The concept changed little in the following years, and in the Dora case it is used to account for the complexity of hysterical phenomena.

But in 1909 Sándor Ferenczi focused interest on the concept of identification when he introduced the similar notion of "introjection." For Ferenczi the ego "is always searching for objects to identify with, transference objects," and introjects them in order to grow. Object love is nothing but introjection. In the following years, in the study of Leonardo da Vinci (1910c), Freud explored this new pathway when he wrote that the young man who will become a homosexual "represses his love for his mother; he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love" (p. 100).

Likewise, "little Hans's" identification with the phobogenic animal, and therefore with his father (1909b), of the Rat Man with his father or mother (1909d), of little Arpad with a cock (Ferenczi, 1913), or the Wolf Man united with his parents during the primal scene (1918b [1914])—all are based on the model found in Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a), namely, the identification with the dead father during the totemic meal. The oral cannibalistic precursor of the mental mechanism of identification, named "incorporation," is clearly indicated in a note added in 1915 to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).

In 1915 the concept of identification was significantly modified, becoming a process integral to the history of the libidinal bonds woven between the ego and the other, even within the subject. The loss of an object narcissistically invested resulted in a phenomenon that Freud described in Mourning and Melancholy (1916-1917g [1915]) as "an identification of the ego with the abandoned object" (p. 249). It is important to understand that this identification, here referred to as "melancholic," is no longer partial and determined by a common trait as was hysterical identification, but total and brought about by withdrawal of the libido, which returns from the lost object to the ego. This was soon after referred to as "narcissistic identification" and considered to be more primal than ordinary identification.

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c), Freud describes three forms 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, as it were by means of introjection of the object into the ego; and thirdly, it may arise with any new perception of a common quality shared with some other person who is not an object of the sexual instinct" (107-108).

The first of these modalities provides an opportunity for Freud to express the dialectic of being and having, which he used later on several occasions. "A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes his father as his ideal" (p. 105). But the initial ambivalence evolves under the pressure of the Oedipus complex, either toward rivalry with the father or homosexual cathexis through identification with the mother. "It is easy to state in a formula the distinction between an identification with the father and the choice of the father as an object. In the first case one's father is what one would like to be, and in the second he is what one would like to have" (p. 106). Seventeen years later, on July 12, 1938, this opposition would continue to disturb Freud, who left a brief trace in his writings: "'Having' and 'being' in children. Children like expressing an object-relation by an identification: 'I am the object.' 'Having' is the later of the two; after loss of the object it relapses into 'being.' Example: the breast. 'The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.' Only later: 'I have it'—that is, 'I am not it"' (1941f [1938], p. 299).

The second modality indicates the replacement of an erotic attachment, associated with the Oedipus complex, through identification and regression. A little girl coughs like her mother. "You are like her, but through suffering." Dora coughs like the love object, her father. In both cases identification is only partial, entirely limited, the ego restricting itself to borrowing only one of the object's traits.

The third modality is original. It introduces the new concept of the ego ideal and embodies it in the person of the "leader." This projection of the ideal promotes the social life of subjects who will be able to identify with one another through this common bond to an other, instead of considering one another as rivals to be destroyed. Young girls with a crush on the same singer are not jealous of one another; the loyal partisans of a leader forget their quarrels and differences. One point needs to be remembered, however: Identification is not here determined by the sexual bond that characterized the community of hysterical identification, which introduced the use of groups and "masses" in sociological research.

With the introduction of the "mythology" of the life and death instincts, and the description of the second topographical subsystem, the concept of identification changed in ways that would continue to enrich it. The nodal situation given to the Oedipus complex led to the description of complex interconnected identifications with each of the parents, which are made and unmade based on the number of possibilities for change and the data concerning their bisexual constitution.

Along with these "hysterical" forms of identification, narcissistic identification assumes particular importance in the formation of the subject. "Since then we have come to understand that this kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its 'character"' (1923b, p. 28). A number of post-Freudian authors like Theodor Reik went so far as to see this as a formative process for the ego itself. This insight helps contextualize the following remarks by Freud concerning the necessary withdrawal of cathexis from libidinal objects, which evolutionary change forces the id to abandon: "It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects. . . . When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id's loss by saying: 'Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object"' (p. 29-30).

Subsequently, Freud defined what he referred to as "primary identification" (primäre Identifizierung), a fundamental process in human mental development that represents a mythical moment similar to that of primary narcissism, primary repression, or even the murder of the father by the primitive horde. The term led to a number of contradictions and misunderstandings, for the term "primary identification" was used to refer to infantile identification of the baby with its mother, something not intended by Freud. As a sign of becoming human he understands it to mean an identification with the "father in his own personal prehistory" (1923b, p. 31) that occurs prior to any form of object choice. It splits the id from the ego ideal, the first split that signifies their connection, which the theory of the formation of the superego subsequently refines. The injunction associated with identification, to "You ought to be like this (like your father)," contradicts the later admonition: "You may not be like this (like your father)" (p. 34). In response to the evolution of the Oedipus complex and the fear of castration, the superego imposes itself as the introjection of the father in his controlling capacity through a later resumption of the primary identification. "Thus we have said repeatedly that the ego is formed to a great extent out of identifications which take the place of abandoned cathexes by the id; that the first of these identifications always behave as a special agency in the ego and stand apart from the ego in the form of a super-ego, while later on, as it grows stronger, the ego may become more resistant to the influences of such identifications. The super-ego owes its special position in the ego, or in relation to the ego, to a factor which must be considered from two sides: on the one hand it was the first identification and one which took place while the ego was still feeble, and on the other hand it is the heir to the Oedipus complex and has thus introduced the most momentous objects into the ego" (1923b, p. 48).

In "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex" (1924d), Freud returned to his description while emphasizing the role of the fear of castration. Because of this, "the object-cathexes are given up and replaced by identifications. The authority of the father or the parents is introjected into the ego, and there it forms the nucleus of the super-ego, which takes over the severity of the father and perpetuates his prohibition against incest, and so secures the ego from the return of the libidinal object-cathexis. The libidinal trends belonging to the Oedipus complex are in part desexualized and sublimated (a thing which probably happens with every transformation into an identification) and in part inhibited in their aim and changed into impulses of affection" (p. 176-77). Here Freud uses the notion of introjection as a sign of a form of assimilation that is more stable and less labile than identifications would be, being closely associated with fantasy. This is a modification of the concept defined earlier by Sándor Ferenczi and another example of the terminological misunderstandings that have hampered the evolution of the concept of identification. In any case "the super-ego retained essential features of the introjected persons—their strength, their severity, their inclination to supervise and to punish" (p. 167), Freud wrote in "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (1924c).

Freud's final thoughts on identification reveal his confusion in the face of its conceptual complexity. In chapter 31 of the New Introductory Lectures (1933a), entitled, "Decomposition of the Psychic Personality," he again attempts—and for the last time—to clarify the various processes he designates as being part of identification and concludes, "I am absolutely not satisfied myself with these developments concerning identification." But he adds a comment that will open a pathway to research on the phenomena of transmission between generations:

As a rule parents and authorities analogous to them follow the precepts of their own super-egos in educating children. Whatever understanding their ego may have come to with their super-ego, they are severe and exacting in educating children. They have forgotten the difficulties of their own childhood and they are glad to be able now to identify themselves fully with their own parents who in the past laid such severe restrictions upon them. Thus a child's superego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents' super-ego; the contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgments of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation. . . . Mankind never lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of the race and of the people, lives on in the ideologies of the super-ego, and yields only slowly to the influences of the present and to new changes; and so long as it operates through the super-ego it plays a powerful part in human life, independently of economic conditions (1933a, p. 67).

The "cruel" father himself had a father whom he took as a model, as well as a mother, and they too had a mother and a father. Every parent replays in his child the world of his own childhood as it has remained engraved in his unconscious and his preconscious fantasies, far removed from the versions he communicates to others or keeps hidden from his conscious memories. It is this universe of origins that the investigative drive of every child explores to discover the secrets of its birth and identity. For its personality is formed with this material of composite images that may one day return in the form of "visitors of the ego" (Mijolla).

Post-Freudian authors have emphasized the psychoanalytic situation surrounding the concept of identification, which Freud did not examine in terms of identification. They have insisted on the necessity and limits associated with transference identification from the patient to the analyst, emphasizing that the analyst must possess a certain amount of empathy (Einfüh-lung), the ability to "understand what is foreign to our ego in other persons" (Freud, 1921c), and even to understand and interpret the analysand's unconscious. Identification with Freud, the founding father, although the source of intense disagreement among his contemporaries and immediate successors, nonetheless remains one of the most vital areas of interest for the analyst. Fantasies of identification, with Freud or with individuals within the "psychoanalytic genealogy" of analysts, can lead to an understanding of certain theoretical propositions and events in the history of psychoanalysis.

Both Anna Freud, through her work on identification with the aggressor, and Melanie Klein, through her work on projective identification, have helped clarify various modes of identification that have confirmed the heuristic benefits of this evasive concept. The interest in relations with the mother has led to a misreading of primary identification, whose paternal-phallic nature was identified by Freud. Following Edith Jacobsen, other authors have presented it as a pre-object archaic mother-child relation situated in a state of fusion/confusion between the self and the not-self (Sandler), and have distinguished it from the concept of "imitation" borrowed from psychological models.

The distinction between "internalization," comprising incorporation, imitation, and introjection, and associated with the construction of identity (Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein), and "externalization" as the distinction between internal objects and external objects, has placed identification at the crossroads of these different systems. Its narcissistic pole has also been elucidated in the so-called "mirror" relation between mother and child, which is distinct from the specular identification of the child at the mirror stage, described by Jacques Lacan (1949). "Secondary identifications" have been isolated to describe the identificatory processes associated with the appearance and growth of the object relation, of pre-oedipal, oedipal and post-oedipal relations, and so on.

Psychoanalytic interest in more serious pathologies has drawn attention to the challenges to identity, whether these involve the behavioral disturbances of adolescence or the depersonalization observed in borderline or psychotic patients. Long before he addressed these issues in his essay on Justice Schreber (1912a), Freud, in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess (December 9, 1899), noted that "paranoia dissolves the identification once more; it re-establishes all the figures loved in childhood which have been abandoned . . . and it dissolves the ego itself into extraneous figures" (1950a, p. 280).

More recently, research on identification has branched off in several directions: "counter-identification," the "identificatory project" (Piera Aulagnier), "archaic identification," "heroic identification" (Didier Anzieu), and "fantasies of unconscious identification" (Mijolla). The number of statements made to account for the richness of the concept seems interminable and psychoanalysts are still trying to determine its nature and formation.

Bibliography

Ferenczi, Sándor. (1916). Introjection and transference. In his Contributions to Psychoanalysis (Ernest Jones, Trans.; pp. 30-80). Boston: Richard G. Badger. (Original work published 1909)

Florence, Jean. (1978). L'Identification dans la théorie freudienne. Brussels: Publications des facultés, Université Saint-Louis.

Grunberger, Béla, and Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine (Eds.). (1978). L'Identification: l'autre c'est moi. Paris: Tchou.

Kanzer, Mark. (1985). Identification and its vicissitudes. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66, 19.

Mijolla, Alain de. (1986). Les Visiteurs du Moi, fantasmes d'identification, Confluents psychanalytiques (2nd ed.). Paris: Les Belles Lettres. (Original work published 1981)

Mijolla, Alain de. (1987). Unconscious identification fantasies and family prehistory. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68, 397-403.

Further Reading

Silverman, Martin. (2002). The will to succeed and the capacity to do so: The power of positive identifications. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 71, 777-800.

Smith, Henry. (2001). Hearing voices: The fate of the analyst's identifications. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 49, 781-812.

—ALAINDE MIJOLLA

A description of an animal sufficient to distinguish it from others. The means of identification include a written description, earmark, paint brand or paper or fabric applied by special adhesive, freeze branding and fire branding (see brand), tattooing, neckbands, ankle bands, ear tagging, tail tagging and tail painting, and electronic identification systems including activated responders or transponders carried on the animal, often subcutaneously.

• patient i. — an adequate identification includes species and breed, sex, color and markings, brands and other distinguishing marks or attachments, whether horned or polled where appropriate, age, name or number used by the owner, and name and address of the owner or custodian.

IN BRIEF: The act of saying who a person is or what a thing is.

Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family. — Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), management expert from Motivation & Personality.

The state of one's self-confidence can be symbolized by the form of identification one has in a dream. A lost or stolen wallet, driver's license, or passport may suggest confusion about the dreamer's self-identity or self-confidence.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - identifikation, legitimation, genkendelse

idioms:

• identification parade    konfrontation

Nederlands (Dutch)
identificatie, vereenzelviging, legitimatie

Français (French)
n. - identification (à partir de), identification (à), pièce d'identité

idioms:

• identification parade    (GB) séance d'identification

Deutsch (German)
n. - Legitimation, Identifizierung, Gleichsetzung

idioms:

• identification parade    Gegenüberstellung zur Identifizierung

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ταυτισμός, συνταύτιση, αναγνώριση, εξακρίβωση ή προσδιορισμός ταυτότητας

idioms:

• identification parade    ομαδική παρουσίαση ατόμων για αναγνώριση υπόπτου

Italiano (Italian)
identificazione

idioms:

• identification parade    confronto all'americana

Português (Portuguese)
n. - identificação (f)

idioms:

• identification parade    fila (f) para identificar culpados

Русский (Russian)
идентификация, выяснение

idioms:

• identification parade    очная ставка

Español (Spanish)
n. - identificación, reconocimiento

idioms:

• identification parade    rueda de presos o de reconocimiento o de identificación

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - identifikation, legitimation, igenkänningstecken, associering

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
认出, 鉴定, 识别, 确认

idioms:

• identification parade    排队辨认嫌疑犯

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 認出, 鑒定, 識別, 確認

idioms:

• identification parade    排隊辨認嫌疑犯

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 동일시, 확인, 신분 증명

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 身元の確認, 同定, 身元を証明するもの, 身分証明

idioms:

• identification parade    面通しの列

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) مطابقه, تحديد‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮זיהוי, מסדר זיהוי‬

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Men's Sterling Silver Identification Bracelet