Identification (psychology) - Freud - Primary Identification

Primary Identification

Primary identification is the original and primitive form of emotional attachment to something or someone prior to any relations with other persons or objects: 'an individual's first and most important identification, his identification with the father in his own personal prehistory...with the parents'. This means that when a baby is born he is not capable of making a distinction between himself and important others. The baby has an emotional attachment with his parents and experiences his parents as a part of himself. ‘The breast is part of me, I am the breast’.

During this process of identification children adopt unconsciously the characteristics of their parents and begin to associate themselves with and copy the behavior of their parents. Freud remarked that identification should be distinguished from imitation, which is a voluntary and conscious act. Because of this process of emotional attachment a child will develop a (super)ego that has similarities to the moral values and guidelines by which the parents live their lives. By this process children become a great deal like their parents and this facilitates learning to live in the world and culture to which they are born.

'By and large, psychoanalysts grant the importance and centrality of primary identification, even though...the concept varies "according to each author and his ideas, its meaning in consequence being far from precise" (Etchegoyen 1985)'.