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This paper discusses a common dynamic among my psychotherapy patients. It is important clinically because it causes serious personality constriction. The affected person cannot acknowledge or develop certain potential capacities or traits. The specific traits are ones remembered as being present to an extreme in a parent towards whom the patient was ambivalent in childhood. Such patients abhor even the thought that they might share these characteristics with that parent.
The patient is rarely aware of this process and is never aware of how damaging it is. The damage comes in the form of chronic, self-imposed limitations upon one's thinking, feelings, communications and actions. These constraints prevent the person from fully tapping his or her* cognitive, affective, interpersonal or creative potential.
Greenson (1954) was aware of resistance to identification in some of his analysands. He explained it along classic psychoanalytic lines. He said that these patients introjected and identified with a hated parent and then tried to remain unaware of this identification. They were defending against powerful archaic drives towards the pre-fusion bad introject. For instance, one patient had strong unconscious “fears and wishes to be devoured. Her struggle against the introjected mother (represented) a struggle against the oral libidinal and sadistic strivings which were involved in this identification.”
Archaic drives, such as oedipal strivings, do play a role in resistance to identification. But in most cases, other factors are equally or more important. Underlying and perpetuating the process are beliefs and fears which are irrational in an adult. They derive from early interpersonal perceptions and continue unmodified throughout life.