Russell Grigg Freud ’ s Problem of Identification

As the theory of identification assumed increasing importance in Freud’s work, it came to be a cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory. Yet because the difficulties contained in Freud’s views on this question have not, with the exception of Lacan, been properly appreciated, post— Freudian theory has employed a theoretical construct of questionable coherence. Although Freud wavered over what was identified with in properly symbolic identification—speaking of identification with the father, with the mother, and sometimes of identification with both—clearly we can conclude from his subsequent realization that the Oedipal drama consists in a “turn toward the father" that it is the question of the father that is at issue in symbolic identification. A second characteristic of this symbolic identification is that it is normative. The function of the father as possessor of the phallus,which is to regulate the desire of the mother as primordial omnipotent Other, brings about the formation of the ego ideal through acting as the support of the subject’s identification. In contrast to this, however, is the fact that the father also has a pathogenic function, playing a causal role as he does in the formation of neuroses. Lacan indicates this double function of being both pathogenic and normal in “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth.” 1 There is of course nothing unusual in this. As psychoanalysis has discovered, it is typical for the one function to have both a normative and a pathological function. Furthermore, it is fairly unproblematic that this Oedipal father should be the subject of identification. More significant is the fact that in Freud’s work the normative function of the father tends gradually to give way to the pathological, and