II. Problems of Identification

This panel was opened with a paper by Ralph Greenson entitled "The Struggle Against Identification," "based on the clinical findings in a group of patients in whom the struggle against identification was of great significance in understanding the clinical and theoretical picture." The author postulated that while fantasies of physical incorporation in infancy resulted in psychic introjection, such introjection might or might not bring about an identification and a transformation of the self into the image of the external object.

He presented four cases, the symptomatology of which was based on a denial of early identifications based on fantasies of oral incorporation. Thus, a woman whose mother was of German extraction refused to use her "mother tongue," while still another consciously dreaded following her mother's pathways of irresponsibility and promiscuity. These patients both experienced swings of mood between states of empty boredom during which they denied their identification with their mothers, and aggressive, promiscuous, overactivity during which they acted out in a fashion identical with their mothers'.

The third patient, a parasitologist, consciously hated his father to the extent of indulging in the fantasy that he was someone else's son. At the same time he suffered from repetitive dreams of having a worm inside his body. Periodic eruptions of aggressive, destructive, sexual behavior were identical with the behavior he loathed in his father. "A chronic good mood was a screen affect which was found to be a countercathexis against an underlying depressive, aggressive state, made possible by the extensive use of negation and denial of perceptions."

The fourth patient was unable to recognize in himself characteristics related to the performance of the sexual act "which his mother despised in his father." Whenever he thought that he was like his father he experienced a feeling of depersonalization except in one activity, sexual intercourse. "Analysis