Main description:

This fascinating book offers an in-depth exploration of the gradual development of the concept of identification as it has evolved in the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis.

Featuring a detailed review of the key Freudian texts, referencing them in their original German, this volume demonstrates how psychoanalysis sheds light on the richness and complexity of the identification process in human psychology, at both the individual and collective levels. The author closely follows the various reformulations of the theory - undertaken by Freud in the course of three different periods - and contextualises them within her clinical experience with various pathologies and her observations of the development of individuals, revealing throughout the great extent to which this fundamental process is unconscious.

Providing a critical examination of a fundamental Freudian concept, this volume is not only a teaching manual serving specifically to train psychoanalysts and psychotherapists but is also an important read for anyone interested in human sciences, philosophy and the history of psychoanalysis.

Contents:

Introduction; Foreword: symptoms, transferences, identifications; Exergue; I. Identification and symptom formation 1. Identification: the first references 2. Hysterical identification A. The dream of the "witty butcher's wife" B. Dream and hysteria: the Dora case 3. Identification in dream-work 4. Identification and the comic A. From dream to witticism B. The species of the comic or the play of comparisons C. Comical illusion; II. Identification and narcissism 1. Identification, orality and object-choice A. A geneaology of identification B. The work of puberty C. The two methods of choosing a sexual object 2. "Totemic" identification A. Identification and projection: magic as a model B. Totemism and the father complex C. Identification theory and practice 3. Narcissistic identification A. The fate of the lost object: mourning or melancholia B. Supplemental note to Mourning and Melancholia: Karl Abraham C. Identification and metapsychology; III. The Oedipus complex and the "institutions" of the ego 1. Identification and repetition compulsion A. Memory and mastery: the double game of Fort-Da 2. Love and identification: the function of the ideal A. The singular and the plural B. Identifications C. The ego and the ego ideal 3. Genesis and structure of formations of the ego: ego and ego ideal - the superego A. Oedipal identifications B. Remarks on the ideal agency C. The work of the ego, between life instinct and death instinct; In conclusion 1. Concluding an itinerary A. Freud I: dream, hysteria and jokes B. Freud II: narcissism C. Freud III: the death instinct and the second topographical model 2. Elements of a metapsychology of identification A. Identification models B. Economy of identification C. Dynamics of identification