1st Edition

Identification in Psychoanalysis A Comprehensive Introduction

By Jean Florence Copyright 2021
    260 Pages
    by Routledge

    260 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    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

    Biography

    Jean Florence is a psychothérapies based in Belgium. As a professor at the UCL between 1973 and 2007, he taught psychology, the psychology of dramatic art, and clinical psychology and psychoanalysis and became Professor Emeritus in 2007. He was President of the Belgian School of Psychoanalysis from 1982 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1997.

    "This book covers new ground within psychoanalytical scholarship. As few psychoanalysts, if any, have written systematically about this subject, Professeur Florence’s work fills an important gap in the literature."

    Brett Kahr, practising psychoanlayst, UK