Genius Loci: The “Place” of Identification in Psychoanalysis

In her successor's place … I should have wished to learn if the office brought with it— Necessary danger to life?

Early in his career, Freud (1905) insisted on being seen as a “medical man” rather than as a “man of letters” (p. 59), but when he considered the question of lay analysis some 20 years later (Freud, 1926), he allowed not only that “[d]octors have no historical claim to the sole possession of psychoanalysis” (p. 229) but also that language and letters play a key role in it: “the word … is a powerful instrument [that] has retained much of its ancient power” (pp. 187-188). As many literary critics have observed, psychoanalysis tends to shore up its scientific ambitions by renouncing its literary affinities, but these literary aspects are nonetheless part of its essential character (; Fuss, 1995; Marcus, 1990). In this essay I consider the significance of one word—Stelle, or place-and one phrase-to “take the place of another”-in Freud's work on the theory of identification. Freud's attempts to capture the elusive phenomenon of identification, from The Interpretation of Dreams to Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and beyond, are haunted by the ghost of Stelle or a kind of genius loci. The analyses that led Freud to posit and develop the concept are pervaded by a single metaphorical structure: the figurative idea of “taking the place of another.” Freud's metaphors are richer and more authoritative than he is willing to acknowledge and entail a more radical conceptual shift than his abstract (scientific) terms. But the metaphor's continued presence in psychoanalytic thinking also suggests