The problems of identification
Here I would like to discuss the issue of identification as a separate topic, as this is specifically important in dealing with Freud’s mourning and transience. While he developed his idea of mourning, Freud also elaborated on the theory of identification in parallel. Freud thought that “Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement to love, so does each single struggle of ambivalence loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it off. (Freud 257. Clewell.p. 60)
In relative to
this process, Freud considered that in melancholia, there is identification of
the ego with the abandoned object (249,Clewell 60). Libido cannot separate from
the object, but the very object is not there anymore, and the object needs to
be taken in and get internalized. Freud called this process “identification”.
Freud thought that a baby, for example, the original identification occurs when
baby takes in mother’s milk, which idea was informed by Abraham. However,
in “Ego and Id”, six years after “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud stated that
identification is no longer a pathological process, but an important process in
the mourning (Clewell, 619). Freud began considering that identification lasts
for a long period. It was obviously a view different from the 1st point that we
saw above.
However, one question
might occur. Freud initially thought in the “Mourning and Melancholia” that
mourning is a process where libido is detached from the object, which is
different from the process of identification. However, Freud seems to be
discussing a process somewhat akin to that of internalization when mourning
occurs. He states that the objects need to be strongly remembered in order to
forget the object. “Each single one of the memories and expectations in which
the libido is bound to be object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the
detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it …. [W]hen the work of
mourning is completed, the ego becomes free and uninhibited again”(p.245).
Clewell states
as follows. ”The work of mourning, as Freud described it here, entails a kind
of hyper-remembering, a process of obsessive recollection during which the
survivor resuscitates the existence of the lost other in the space of the
psyche, replacing an actual absence with an imaginary presence.”(p.44).”With a
very specific task to perform, the Freudian grief work seeks, then, to convert
loving remembrances into a futureless memory.(p.44)”.
Again, it is not
clear how much this hypermnesia and imaginary presence (Clewell) that Freud suggested
in the mourning process is different from identification in melancholia described
in the “Mourning and Melancholia.” At least they share a common feature: powerful
internalization of the lost object. While elaborating on the identification
process, Freud might have realized that it is not simply a memory of the lost
object, but the image of the object living internally as an agent. The lost
object is no longer a cold memory, but a live part of the ego. Clewell describes
this process as follows: “it is only by internalizing the lost other through
the work of bereaved identification, Freud now claims, that one becomes a
subject in the first place”.(p.61)
Freud might have
had an insight in “Mourning and Melancholia” that transient object can become a
part of the ego with added beauty and value, through a painful process of “foretaste
of the mourning”. Once internalized, the object is given a new life again, with
an added brightness, just as a planet becomes a star shining on its own.
Identification thus
understood can be in accord with Hoffman’s view commented by Slavin. In a
sense, Freud might have anticipated dialectic constructivist view later
presented by Hoffman.