Identification is a concept that raises many questions in psychoanalysis, both for technique and theory. In particular, questions arise about the level at which the mechanisms of identification operate in the course of the analytic process. Another important issue is whether identification or the object relation comes first. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud made statements that seem paradoxical to us today, first that identification is "the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person," and then that this "kind of tie is … possible before any sexual object-choice has been made." To understand this, we must understand to what point the theory had been developed in 1921 when this was written, and its relationship to the structural theory introduced in The Ego and the Id in 1923. In the latter work we find Freud's more advanced thinking on the question of identification. There,