Character, Psychoanalytic Identification, and Numerical Identity

Identification figures prominently in moral psychological explanations. I argue that in identification the subject has an ‘identity-thought’, which is a thought about her numerical identity with the figure she identifies with. In Freud’s psychoanalytic psychology character is founded on unconscious identification with parental figures. Moral philosophers have drawn on psychoanalysis to explain how undesirable or disadvantageous character dispositions are resistant to insight through being unconscious. According to Richard Wollheim’s analysis of Freud’s theory, identification is the subject’s disposition to imagine, unconsciously, her bodily merging with the figure she identifies with. I argue that this explanation of identification is not adequate. Human character is held to be capable of change when self-reflection brings unconscious identifications to conscious self-knowledge. I argue that for self-knowledge these identifications must be an intelligible part of the subject’s self-conception, and that Wollheim’s ‘merging phantasy’ is not intelligible to the subject in this way. By contrast, the subject’s thought that she is numerically identical to the figure she identifies with does provide an intelligible starting-point for reflecting on this identification. This psychoanalytic account provides a clear conception of identification with which to investigate puzzle cases in the moral psychology of character. 1. Identification. In this paper I argue for ‘putting the identity back into identification’. When we speak of someone as ‘identifying’ with another person (whether alive, or dead, or fictional), we mean that she sees herself in a psychological relation with that figure, some of whose characteristics are possessed by her in virtue of that relation. I shall argue that this relation (between the subject and the relevant figure) is represented in the mind of the subject as an ‘identity-thought’ whose content is her numerical identity with that figure. Identification itself is an explanatory concept well-established in the vocabulary of moral and ordinary psychology. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology defines this sense of identification as: ‘the becoming or making of oneself one with another, in interest, feeling or action.’ 1 We indicate our understanding of someone by saying that we ‘identify with’ them, meaning that we feel as they feel. 2 Or, we may explain someone’s actions by saying that they ‘identify with’ another figure with the same behaviour traits. Such identifications may be temporary, or may become permanent parts of character. ‘He is his father over again’, we say or, ‘Under such circumstances I become my mother’. Identification also figures in the explanation of moral character; on the one hand, as the holding of, by ‘identifying with’, parental and societal values, on the other as explaining deviations such as masochistic ‘identification with the aggressor’, or homophobia. 3 1 C.T. Onions (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p.459. The etymology of ‘identification’ is ‘making the same’ and nominalises ‘to identify’; it is not the making of ‘identity’ as personal character. The Oxford Dictionary gives two further definitions of ‘to identify’: (i) ‘the recognition of a thing as being what it is’; (ii) ‘the making, regarding or treating one thing as identical with another, or two or more things as identical with one another’, the logical sense that I maintain is central to psychological identification. 2 Some philosophers have taken this apparently simple case to mean, differently, that we ‘see’ or imagine, or ‘simulate’ how the other feels. Philosophical discussions of ‘simulation’ and ‘empathy’ are too inconclusive to be useful here. 3 See J.David Velleman, Self to Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ch.14 p. 347 covers some of this ground. See also Michael Stocker and Elizabeth Hegeman, Valuing Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.215. They characterise identification as an ‘aspect’ or a ‘sort’ of interpersonal relationship, as well as what ‘intrapersonally helps account for and constitute these