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In the course of doing a review19 of Jacobson's recent monograph7 concerning identity-development I have had occasion to formulate the theoretical considerations and bring together the clinical data to be presented here. My review, while taking note of much that I found masterfully instructive in her monograph, pointed out her undervaluing of the role of symbiosis in identity development and maintenance, her failure to see the significance for man's identity-formation of his relationship with his non-human environment, and her underestimation of the mutuality of parent-child dependency—dependency in regard to, among other matters, the formation of their respective identities. I shall take the opportunity here to flesh out those briefly-made points and to describe other aspects of identity not touched upon by Jacobson—in particular, to discuss the relationship between murderousness and identity formation and to describe the functioning of a healthy sense of identity as comprising one's most reliable organ for perceiving the world.
Ambivalence concerning identity; the role of the non-human environment in identity formation; healthy identity seen as based in and expressive of internalized mother-infant symbiosis.
Jacobson's monograph does not portray how ceaselessly conflictual, how ambivalent, human beings are concerning the development of an identity—and concerning, as well, the development of object relations;