Identification (psychology) - Identification With The Analyst

Identification With The Analyst

Mainstream analytic thought is broadly agreed that interpretation took effect 'by utilizing positive transference and transitory identifications with the analyst'. More controversial, however, was the concept of 'the terminal identification' at the close of analysis, where 'that with which the patient identifies is their strong ego... identification with the analyst's superego'.

Lacan took strong exception to 'any analysis that one teaches as having to be terminated by identification with the analyst...There is a beyond to this identification...this crossing of the plane of identification'. Most Lacanians have subsequently echoed his distrust of 'the view of psychoanalysis that relies on identification with the analyst as a central curative factor'. How far the same criticism applies, however, to those who see as a positive therapeutic result 'the development of a self-analytic attitude... identification with and internalization of the analyst's analytic attitude' is not perhaps quite clear.

Marion Milner has argued that "terminal identification" can be most acute in those analysands who go on to become therapists themselves: 'by the mere fact of becoming analysts we have succeeded in bypassing an experience which our patients have to go though. We have chosen to identify with our analyst's profession and to act out that identification'.