Forum

(04/06/2016) ✕

Share:

According to psychoanalysis there is no identity, no ego established in advance. In On Narcissism, where he introduces the term Ichideal as the self-observing intrapsychic instance, Freud writes: »I may point out that we are bound to supposed that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed." [Cf. Freud, S. On Narcissism (1914)] The process whereby an ego comes to exists is called the identification. The concept of identification has been evolving along the basic theories of Freud and later, Jacques Lacan. It is one of the most important concepts in psychoanalysis. As Freud writes in the seventh chapter of the Mass Psychology and the Analysis of Ego (1921): »Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. It plays a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex.” It is also highly connected to the concept of Nachtraeglichkeit, which Lacan took after Freud in the temporal sense means the unusual combination of anticipation and retroaction. The process of identification, elaborated first by Freud and later by Lacan, states that the Ego is basically an object, which according to Lacan completely belongs to the register of the Imaginary. In the beginning there are two different processes which run side by side, until they cross each other and come into conflict with each other in the process of the unification of the mental life, more famously known as the Oedipus complex. In general, the process of identification takes up in the early stages of the formation of the Self (the individual), via a certain kind of process of alienation within the image of one’s own body: In The Ego and the Id, Freud puts the emphasis on this visual aspect. "The ego," he says, "is first and foremost a bodily ego, it is not merely a surface entity but is itself the projection of a surface" (SE, 19:26).«[Boothby, R., Freud as Philosopher. Metapsychology After Lacan, New York and London: Routledge, 2001, p. 140.]...