Identification with the Enemy and Loss of the Sense of Self

Identification is one of the forms of object relationship found to some extent in everyone. In early childhood it is one of the methods of mastering the environment. The child not yet possessed of sufficient knowledge or experience to make a critical evaluation of the attitudes and standards he finds surrounding him takes on uncritically the point of view, ways of life and even mannerisms of some person or persons in authority. Gradually, if he is unhampered, critical attitudes begin to develop. By increasing the number of people with whom he makes identifications he encounters conflicting ideologies and personal attitudes, and among these he is able to find his preferences and slowly to develop a point of view of his own.

In general, these identifications are expressions of positive feeling. The child tries to be like the individual he loves and admires. However, another type of identification exists. In her recent book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence,1 Anna Freud has described identification with the aggressor as an ego defense. She stresses the power which the child thus obtains. With this power he feels himself equal to the threatening authority. She does not mention, however, what may happen within the child's own personality when the identification is maintained over a long period of time. Since the identification rises primarily out of fear, the child is really joining forces with a hostile power. In doing so he surrenders part of his own interests. He has taken into himself an ideology not because he admires it or believes in it, but chiefly for protective purposes. The enemy he feared from the outside has, so to speak, reappeared inside himself. Towards this incorporated imago the young child has greater difficulty in developing a critical attitude than towards the friendly one because any