In those painful days his comfort was his quiet daughter who seemed to be in all respects the opposite of her moody mother. He sought sanctuary with her, and over and over again she had to listen to his cries for peace.
Finally his nervous condition got so bad that a physician had to be consulted. The physician being fully aware of the patient’s domestic relations did not have to consider very long and ordered the sick man to take a trip. More easily prescribed than done. For our patient had one very bad habit: he could not be alone. It was a cruel punishment for him to have to look after his small daily wants away from home. What was he to do? His wife would gladly have gone along with him. But there were numerous objections to that. Besides, the wise physician would not hear of it. In this quandary the distressed man thought of his gentle, affectionate, young daughter. Everybody rejoiced at this happy solution; the anxious physician, the jealous wife, and, not least, the sensible daughter who had not yet seen anything of the world and whose secret dreams of youth had been disturbed by the erratic educational methods of her mother, in which exaggerated love and pitiless sternness alternated.
Great excitement marked the time for departure. Mother changed her plans ten times over. First she wanted to drop everything and accompany her husband; then she wanted to induce the unhappy husband to give up the trip, and so on. Finally the time for departure arrived. They were on the platform at the station and were saying the last good-byes. Mother had an unlimited number of things to say and suggestions to make. Then the conductor gave the last warning and there was no time to lose. Through the little window the happy father and the still happier daughter looked out on the source of their woes who had been suddenly converted into an inexhaustible fountain of tears. Was she so grieved because the objects upon whom she was wont to project the discontent of her unresting heart were gone? With a sudden movement she wiped away her tears and called after her daughter in stentorian tones: “Freda, now you’ll take the place of your mother! Remember that!”—What else she said was lost in the din of the moving train whose shrill whistle drowned the asthmatic woman’s commanding tones. During the next few seconds they waved their last greetings and then the scene so painful to all was over.
Father and daughter looked at each other, their faces beaming. For a little while, at any rate, they would be free and have nothing else to do but to enjoy life. The mother’s last words rang in their ears. Involuntarily the man smiled and remarked tenderly to his daughter: “Well—I shall be curious to see how my little sunshine will take her mother’s place.” The little one looked at her father seriously and replied: “Papa, I shall try to do so to the best of my power, surely.” And deep within her she rejoiced at the thought that strangers might think her really the young wife of this fine-looking man.
After a few minutes Freda began to complain that it was getting very cold. “There is a draught! It’s terribly cold!” The anxious father at once closed the window. After a little while she complained that the compartment was unbearably stuffy. Why had not the conductor assigned them a more spacious one? Had papa given him a tip? She had been told by a friend who had just returned from a wedding trip in Italy that conductors are respectful and accommodating only to those who give liberal tips. She was not so inexperienced as a certain papa seemed to think. If he gave the man the tip they would surely be transferred to a more comfortable car. Somewhat irritated, the father complied with his daughter’s wish. After considerable trouble they were transferred from their small cosy compartment in which they could sit alone, to a large one into which a stout elderly gentleman entered at the next station and plumped himself down beside them. Freda had an insurmountable repugnance to fat old gentlemen. She reproached her father; he had not given the conductor a large enough tip.
Why waste words? After a few hours the poor man saw only too clearly that his daughter was bent on taking her mother’s place in the true sense of the word. She pestered him with her moods and gave him not a minute’s rest. He tried to console himself with the thought that Freda was not herself owing to the excitement of the last few days, and that she would soon be herself again. Vain hope! The girl was as if transformed. From a quiet, amiable child, she had become a moody, fractious torment. The trip which had been intended as a cure became an unmitigable torture. For at home he knew how to adapt himself quietly to his wife’s tyranny. But here, away from home, he was constantly getting into all sorts of unpleasant situations. Finally, he pretended to be too sick to continue the trip and after a few days they returned home.
I have narrated this tragic-comical history in such detail because it makes the meaning of “Identification” clearer than any definition could. What had happened to the young girl to transform her so quickly? Her mother had enjoined her to take her place. She had to some extent taken upon herself her mother’s duties. She identified herself with her mother. She played the role of mother exactly as she had for years seen it played at home, though, in secret, she had disapproved of her mother’s conduct. This identification nullified her own personality and replaced it with another.
This is a phenomenon that takes the most surprising forms among the victims of hysteria. But it would be erroneous to think that it occurs only among hysterics. Almost all persons, especially women, succumb to the seductive power of identification. I wonder if it is because of this that all of us secretly bear a measure of neurosis with us throughout life! At home, Freda might have concealed her hysteria as a kind of reaction to her mother’s conduct. It was only when she had to play the mother’s role that the neurosis, in consequence of an unconscious affect, became manifest. It is thus that epidemics of hysteria break out. If a neurosis is capable of transferring an affect, it can arouse another, slumbering neurosis. For to-day we know, from Bleuler’s studies, that suggestion is not the transference of an idea but an affect.
The phenomenon that the above case brings out so clearly and unequivocally may be seen in everyday life behind various motives, catchwords, tendencies, and strivings. Notwithstanding these disguises the eye of the investigator will not find it difficult to recognize the mechanism of identification and the element of the neurosis in the normal person. But if this is so everybody is neurotic. Let us not get excited about this conclusion. There is no such thing as a normal human being. What we call disease and abnormality are only the highest peaks of a mountain chain that rises to various heights above the sea-level of the normal. Every person has his weak spots, physical and psychical. We can reckon only relative heights, never the absolute, inasmuch as a standard of the normal is really never at our disposal.
There is no difficulty in finding illustrations of the process of identification in the so-called normal. Take, for example, the valet of the nobleman. How thoroughly imbued he is with his master’s pride of ancestry! With what imperturbable scorn he looks down upon the common rabble! It never enters his mind that he is one of the masses. He has no glimmer of appreciation of the absurdity of his airs, because the mechanism of identification has clouded his intellect and an emotion has strangled his logic. He even gives verbal expression to his feeling of identification. He seems to have become fused into a unity with his master, for he submerges his individuality, his ego, and on every occasion speaks of “we” and “us.”