On Psychotic Identifications1

Not only in the manic-depressive but also in the schizophrenic groups of psychoses, pathological mechanisms of identification seem to play a paramount part in the psychotic symptom formation. From Freud's, Abraham's, Rado's, Klein's papers, we are familiar with the narcissistic identifications underlying the delusional ideas in manic-depressive states. But apart from the paranoid projections, the nature and functions of the identification mechanisms operating in schizophrenic processes have not been so systematically investigated.

It is a challenging task indeed to study and to compare their nature and their role in symptom formation with the corresponding phenomena in manic-depressive psychosis. The time allotted to this presentation does not permit of more than a very limited approach to the problem. May I begin with the statement that evidently, in the regressive processes induced by the psychosis, early preoedipal mechanisms of identification are revived whose general characteristics I wish to define, briefly, in contradistinction to normal ego identification.

For this purpose I may use the term 'self-representations', in analogy to 'object-representations'. This term refers to the endopsychic concept of the bodily and mental self which, built up in the course of ego formation, normally reflects the characteristics, the state, and the functions of our conscious and preconscious ego. The term is of special value for the study of psychosis, because in these disorders the realistic representations, not only of the object world but also of the self as an integrated entity, are apt to break down and to be replaced by distorted, unrealistic, delusional concepts. In fact, the psychotic is confused about both, about the objects and his own self; a state which reminds us of the early infantile stage before the boundaries between the self and the love objects have been firmly established, a stage when the child is flooded by magic images of the object world and of hi