The author cites various concepts of identification in psychoanalytic writings. Freud and Redl considered groups as numbers of people whose emotional relationships to a central figure, either positive or negative, were a means of relieving internal conflicts. Anna Freud differentiated between identification, the emotional tie between people, and the mechanism of defense of altruistic surrender and identification with the aggressor. Identification is not genital object love but assimilation of an aspect of the external world and an extension of the ego. It involves adaptation to reality, reality testing, the sense of reality, the concept of self, and object relations; it does not involve a pathological engulfment of personality by another object or the regressive replacement of an earlier love object. Identification with the group as a whole with desexualized sublimated group relationships springing from work in common is discussed. While the group is largely an instrument for conscious need satisfaction, emotional support, protection,