The Psychoanalytic Identity: Five Hypotheses for Discussion

That which is different from something is different by something, or in some respect, so that it is necessary that something wherein they differ should be the same.

If you look up the topic of «identity» in the pages of the glorious Einaudi Encyclopaedia you are quickly directed to the entries which conclude volume VI, where the heading Identity/difference (Rambaldi, 1979) comes between Identification and transference (Bernard-Weil, 1979) and Ideology (Vuillemin, 1979). In order to conceptualise the theme which the Rivista di Psicoanalisi has decided to address in this edition, the editors of the summa of secular thought in the nineteen-seventies offered a conceptual summary which - and here is the first hypothesis - remains persuasive even today. «Identity and differences they wrote (Vuillemin, 1979, 1143), «form one of the most important philosophical couplings, inseparable extremes of any method, whether analytic or synthetic», recognised from the beginning as «indispensable categories for a systematic knowledge of the world» (Vuillemin, 1979, 1143).

The two concepts have different origins which derive, on the one hand, from the vicissitudes of subjective psychic life (the identifications and transferences which constitute it) and on the other from the processes which produce and reproduce the collective forms of thought (theories, philosophies, and ideologies).

In the following pages I have tried to bring together observations and reflections which aim to shed light, not on the paradoxes of identity in general (an endless topic, and not appropriate to the purposes of this paper) but on those posited specifically by psychoanalytic identity (and here too, only those which seemed to me the most necessary and relevant).

The few words chosen for the title announce the conceptual principles of the discussion offered here and anticipate the hypotheses that seem necessary for reflection