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Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly. Am I a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming he is a man?
Identity has been defined (Moore and Fine 1968) as “the experience of the self as a unique coherent entity which is continuous and remains the same despite inner psychic and outside environmental changes.” Identification, in its turn, is “an automatic, unconscious process whereby an individual becomes like another person in one or several aspects. It is a natural accompaniment of maturation and mental development and aids in the learning process (including the learning of speech and language), as well as in the acquisition of interests, ideals, mannerisms, etc. … For identification to occur, sufficient psychic development must have taken place for the individual to distinguish himself from others in the environment.” In effect the standard definition of identification makes it conterminous with all the facets of what Sullivan termed the acculturation process.
The presumption in the foregoing definitions as well as in most psychoanalytic and other theories of human development (with Melanie Klein being an outstanding exception) is that the infant is born as a nonperson, a nonhuman animal, a tabula rasa, except for certain appetitive imperatives and an anlage or substrate which has the potential for fulfilling the requirements for becoming human. To define the essence of being human is not so easy, however. For some psychoanalytic theorists, such as Erich Fromm (1955), the essence of the human lies in the attribution and development of