Imitation and Identification1

The subject of imitation and identification affords an opportunity to explore some of the common ground of psychology and psychiatry. Imitation is a concept tied up with instinct, learning theory, and the conditioned reflex—three subjects which are prominent in psychological thinking. Identification, on the other hand, is a clinical term, vaguely definable, which is associated with a variety of phenomena: suggestion, object relations, regression, and introjection, all of which are significant problems in current psychiatric science. My purpose here is to take two easily confused and overlapping terms, one from psychology, the other from psychiatry, and try to find a theoretical framework which will fit together the facts from both sides, making it possible, I hope, to think more clearly about both the psychological and psychiatric aspects of them.

Historical Orientation

Early writers like Bagehot, Tarde, and Ross said that imitation explains the spread of social beliefs and practices, that it insures uniformity in culture, accounts for fashion, crime, education, new inventions (33). It is the social particular of the universal law of repetition. Aside from these impressive claims, imitation was generally classified into two types: 1) rational, logical, intelligent, or subjective and 2) emotional, instinctual, or mimetic. Because this dichotomous classification recurs frequently in the literature, the tendency of some writers to discard the second, emotional or instinctual type, may be viewed with reserve. We may in the end have to give the forefathers credit for their insight.

The twentieth century ushered in the new era of experimental psychology, and imitation became the subject of numerous and contradictory studies. Thorndike declared that imitation as a universal tendency is a myth (28). Kinnaman (22) and Hobhouse (15) found that monkeys were able to imitate. Haggerty (11) added confirmation. Warden and Jackson (30), who used the duplicate cage method a