Freudian Identification

This chapter presents two main paths to understanding the concept of identification in Freud. The first was developed by Freud mainly during the 1910s, when he took identifications as a form of chain, or psychical series, into which the individual established a pattern in her/his interactions with others through life. The second path was mostly developed in the 1921 text on group psychology, where Freud thought of identification as a sort of illness, an infection that functions as a symptom of the relation the individual establishes with others. Brief examples from everyday life, psychoanalytic clinic and Freud’s case of Dora are provided for better understanding of the terms.