Freud - Complete Works (631 page)

   But all these questions, which
may, moreover, have been dealt with in part in the literature of
group psychology, will not succeed in diverting our interest from
the fundamental psychological problems that confront us in the
structure of a group. And our attention will first be attracted by
a consideration which promises to bring us in the most direct way
to a proof that libidinal ties are what characterize a group.

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   Let us keep before our eyes the
nature of the emotional relations which hold between men in
general. According to Schopenhauer’s famous simile of the
freezing porcupines no one can tolerate a too intimate approach to
his neighbour.¹

   The evidence of psycho-analysis
shows that almost every intimate emotional relation between two
people which lasts for some time - marriage, friendship, the
relations between parents and children² - contains a sediment
of feelings of aversion and hostility, which only escapes
perception as a result of repression. This is less disguised in the
common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a
subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come
together in larger units. Every time two families become connected
by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better
birth than the other. Of two neighbouring towns each is the
other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down
upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one
another at arm’s length; the South German cannot endure the
North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the
Scot, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese. We are no longer
astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost
insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the
German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the
coloured.

  
¹
‘A company of porcupines crowded
themselves very close together one cold winter’s day so as to
profit by one another’s warmth and so save themselves from
being frozen to death. But soon they felt one another’s
quills, which induced them to separate again. And now, when the
need for warmth brought them nearer together again, the second evil
arose once more. So that they were driven backwards and forwards
from one trouble to the other, until they had discovered a mean
distance at which they could most tolerably exist.’
(
Parerga und Paralipomena
, Part II, 31, ‘Gleichnisse
und Parabeln’.)

  
²
Perhaps with the solitary exception of the
relation of a mother to her son, which is based on narcissism, is
not disturbed by subsequent rivalry, and is reinforced by a
rudimentary attempt at sexual object-choice.

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   When this hostility is directed
against people who are otherwise loved we describe it as
ambivalence of feeling; and we explain the fact, in what is
probably far too rational a manner, by means of the numerous
occasions for conflicts of interest which arise precisely in such
intimate relations. In the undisguised antipathies and aversions
which people feel towards strangers with whom they have to do we
may recognize the expression of self-love - of narcissism. This
self-love works for the preservation of the individual, and behaves
as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular
lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for
their alteration. We do not know why such sensitiveness should have
been directed to just these details of differentiation; but it is
unmistakable that in this whole connection men give evidence of a
readiness for hatred, an aggressiveness, the source of which is
unknown, and to which one is tempted to ascribe an elementary
character.¹

   But when a group is formed the
whole of this intolerance vanishes, temporarily or permanently,
within the group. So long as a group formation persists or so far
as it extends, individuals in the group behave as though they were
uniform, tolerate the peculiarities of its other members, equate
themselves with them, and have no feeling of aversion towards them.
Such a limitation of narcissism can, according to our theoretical
views, only be produced by one factor, a libidinal tie with other
people. Love for oneself knows only one barrier - love for others,
love for objects.² The question will at once be raised whether
community of interest in itself, without any addition of libido,
must not necessarily lead to the toleration of other people and to
considerateness for them. This objection may be met by the reply
that nevertheless no lasting limitation of narcissism is effected
in this way, since this tolerance does not persist longer than the
immediate advantage gained from the other people’s
collaboration. But the practical importance of this discussion is
less than might be supposed, for experience has shown that in cases
of collaboration libidinal ties are regularly formed between the
fellow-workers which prolong and solidify the relation between them
to a point beyond what is merely profitable. The same thing occurs
in men’s social relations as has become familiar to
psycho-analytic research in the course of the development of the
individual libido. The libido attaches itself to the satisfaction
of the great vital needs, and chooses as its first objects the
people who have a share in that process. And in the development of
mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the
civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism
to altruism. And this is true both of sexual love for women, with
all the obligations which it involves of not harming the things
that are dear to women, and also of desexualized, sublimated
homosexual love for other men, which springs from work in
common.

  
¹
In a recently published study,
Beyond
the Pleasure Principle
, I have attempted to connect the
polarity of love and hatred with a hypothetical opposition between
instincts of life and death, and to establish the sexual instincts
as the purest examples of the former, the instincts of
life.

  
²
See my paper on narcissism
(1914
c
).

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   If therefore in groups
narcissistic self-love is subject to limitations which do not
operate outside them, that is cogent evidence that the essence of a
group formation consists in new kinds of libidinal ties among the
members of the group.

   Our interest now leads us on to
the pressing question as to what may be the nature of these ties
which exist in groups. In the psycho-analytic study of neuroses we
have hitherto been occupied almost exclusively with ties with
objects made by love instincts which still pursue directly sexual
aims. In groups there can evidently be no question of sexual aims
of that kind. We are concerned here with love instincts which have
been diverted from their original aims, though they do not operate
with less energy on that account. Now, within the range of the
usual sexual object-cathexis, we have already observed phenomena
which represent a diversion of the instinct from its sexual aim. We
have described them as degrees of being in love, and have
recognized that they involve a certain encroachment upon the ego.
We shall now turn our attention more closely to these phenomena of
being in love, in the firm expectation of finding in them
conditions which can be transferred to the ties that exist in
groups. But we should also like to know whether this kind of
object-cathexis, as we know it in sexual life, represents the only
manner of emotional tie with other people, or whether we must take
other mechanisms of the sort into account. As a matter of fact we
learn from psycho-analysis that there do exist other mechanisms for
emotional ties, the so-called
identifications
,
insufficiently-known processes and hard to describe, the
investigation of which will for some time keep us away from the
subject of group psychology.

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VII

IDENTIFICATION

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. A little
boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to
grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere. We
may say simply that he takes his father as his ideal. This
behaviour has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude
towards his father (and towards males in general); it is on the
contrary typically masculine. It fits in very well with the Oedipus
complex, for which it helps to prepare the way.

   At the same time as this
identification with his father, or a little later, the boy has
begun to develop a true object-cathexis towards his mother
according to the attachment type. He then exhibits, therefore, two
psychologically distinct ties: a straightforward sexual
object-cathexis towards his mother and an identification with his
father which takes him as his model. The two subsist side by side
for a time without any mutual influence or interference. In
consequence of the irresistible advance towards a unification of
mental life, they come together at last; and the normal Oedipus
complex originates from their confluence. The little boy notices
that his father stands in his way with his mother. His
identification with his father then takes on a hostile colouring
and becomes identical with the wish to replace his father in regard
to his mother as well. Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from
the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as
easily as into a wish for someone’s removal. It behaves like
a derivative of the first,
oral
phase of the organization of
the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is
assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such. The
cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint; he has a
devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom
he is fond.

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   The subsequent history of this
identification with the father may easily be lost sight of. It may
happen that the Oedipus complex becomes inverted, and that the
father is taken as the object of a feminine attitude, an object
from which the directly sexual instincts look for satisfaction; in
that event the identification with the father has become the
precursor of an object-tie with the father. The same holds good,
with the necessary substitutions, of the baby daughter as well.

   It is easy to state in a formula
the distinction between an identification with the father and the
choice of the father as an object. In the first case one’s
father is what one would like to
be
and in the second he is
what one would like to
have
. The distinction, that is,
depends upon whether the tie attaches to the subject or to the
object of the ego. The former kind of tie is therefore already
possible before any sexual object-choice has been made. It is much
more difficult to give a clear metapsychological representation of
the distinction. We can only see that identification endeavours to
mould a person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that
has been taken as a model.

   Let us disentangle identification
as it occurs in the structure of a neurotic symptom from its rather
complicated connections. Supposing that a little girl (and we will
keep to her for the present) develops the same painful symptom as
her mother - for instance, the same tormenting cough. This may come
about in various ways. The identification may come from the Oedipus
complex; in that case it signifies a hostile desire on the
girl’s part to take her mother’s place, and the symptom
expresses her object-love towards her father, and brings about a
realization, under the influence of a sense of guilt, of her desire
to take her mother’s place: ‘You wanted to be your
mother, and now you
are
- anyhow so far as your sufferings
are concerned.’ This is the complete mechanism of the
structure of a hysterical symptom. Or, on the other hand, the
symptom may be the same as that of the person who is loved; so, for
instance, Dora¹ imitated her father’s cough. In that
case we can only describe the state of things by saying
that
identification has appeared instead of object-choice, and that
object-choice has regressed to identification
. We have heard
that identification is the earliest and original form of emotional
tie; it often happens that under the conditions in which symptoms
are constructed, that is, where there is repression and where the
mechanisms of the unconscious are dominant, object-choice is turned
back into identification - the ego assumes the characteristics of
the object. It is noticeable that in these identifications the ego
sometimes copies the person who is not loved and sometimes the one
who is loved. It must also strike us that in both cases the
identification is a partial and extremely limited one and only
borrows a single trait from the person who is its object.

  
¹
In my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria’ (1905
e
)
.

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   There is a third particularly
frequent and important case of symptom formation, in which the
identification leaves entirely out of account any object-relation
to the person who is being copied. Supposing, for instance, that
one of the girls in a boarding school has had a letter from someone
with whom she is secretly in love which arouses her jealousy, and
that she reacts to it with a fit of hysterics; then some of her
friends who know about it will catch the fit, as we say, by mental
infection. The mechanism is that of identification based upon the
possibility or desire of putting oneself in the same situation. The
other girls would like to have a secret love affair too, and under
the influence of a sense of guilt they also accept the suffering
involved in it. It would be wrong to suppose that they take on the
symptom out of sympathy. On the contrary, the sympathy only arises
out of the identification, and this is proved by the fact that
infection or imitation of this kind takes place in circumstances
where even less pre-existing sympathy is to be assumed than usually
exists between friends in a girls’ school. One ego has
perceived a significant analogy with another upon one point - in
our example upon openness to a similar emotion; an identification
is thereupon constructed on this point, and, under the influence of
the pathogenic situation, is displaced on to the symptom which the
one ego has produced. The identification by means of the symptom
has thus become the mark of a point of coincidence between the two
egos which has to be kept repressed.