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By the term 'identification' we denote a normal mental process applied by an individual with the tendency to become like another person. Identifications make use of the mechanism of 'introjection' (or 'incorporation'). The individual 'introjects' the image of the other person, he 'takes over' some or many of the latter's characteristics. In normal growth 'identifications' express themselves in different contexts during the various phases of maturation and development. In this short paper I have to limit myself to the description of only a few of them.
As identification is a form of relationship with an object, it can only manifest itself after some (primitive) differentiation between self and object has come into existence.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud defines identification as 'the earliest expression of an emotional bond with another person'.
In normal development the process of identification serves different aims. I will mention three of them:
i.Identification is one of the ways to secure the satisfaction of bodily and psychical needs, provided by the object.
ii.It finds a place in, and promotes, the process of learning. The little child acquires intellectual knowledge, it learns to speak, to read, to handle toys and tools, to test reality as well as to master emotional situations, and to adjust its instinctual life to the demands of the environment in large measure by identification with parents, siblings and other persons. All these learned skills may be called ego-achievements.
iii.Identifications form the base of the ego-ideal. In the pre-oedipal, magic phase of development the little child identifies itself with the images of omnipotent parents in order to feel as powerful as they are imagined to be.
In normal development the ego-ideal unfolds and widens its contents through new identifications with other persons, examples in social life, etc., a process continuing throughout the whole lifetime and constituting one of the normal ou