The work of identifications permeated the work of Freud, who perceived the plurality of “psychic persons involved in identification”. Freud introduced several forms of identification : narcissistic, hysterical and melancholic. Identification follows two basic paths : the immediate incorporation of an affective tie with a person, which is the source of an experience of satisfaction, produces registrations of perceptual memory traces ; a second path gives access to the hallucination of satisfaction promoting desire. In contrast, the experience of psychic pain bears the traces of a breach and of the object that slips away, blurring the boundaries and reappearing in the countertransference in a specific way. In the treatment, these traces of different experiences face the patient with the task of recognising traces which we call inner archives. Analysing the compulsion to identify leads us to look at the construction of new forms of identification in the treatment.