How we become different (or not) to our parents. The Role of Disidentification in the Growth and/or Stifling of Personality Evolution. (original) (raw)

DiSiDeNTiFiCaTioN & its role in the Growth of PersoNaLiTY

Australasian J Psychotherapy

Looks at two types of Disidentification - a healthy, growth-promoting form, born of successful and loving introjection, & an angry, repudiating form - which stifles growth and the becoming of one's "own person".

Ambivalent Identifications: Narcissism, Melancholia, and Sublimation

Consecutio Rerum: Rivista critica della Postmodernità, 2022

Beginning with Freud's treatment of identification as an ambivalent process, we explore identification's polarization between narcissistic idealization and melancholic division. While narcissistic identification can be seen as a strategy adopted by the ego to avoid the educational development of its drives and to maintain itself either in whole or in part in an infantile state, melancholic identification activates a tension between the ego-ideal and the real ego at the expense of the latter. After discussing the ambivalence of identification, we review Freud's discussion of mass formations as group identifications, arguing that the work of facilitating a productive sublimation of the drives cannot be reduced to a strengthening of the artificial masses represented by social institutions such as the church and the educational system. Instead, the difference between mass formations allowing for collective sublimation and those suffering from narcissistic or melancholic blockages must be found in the productive qualities of the mass itself. In closing, we outline a few ways in which we might begin to understand the political contribution of masses to the maturation of human drives.

Not wanting to be like father: how shame turns into guilt and inhibition

This paper attempts to revive psychoanalytic interest in social character. The seminal work of earlier theorists on culture and personality hit a chord in the general public, during a period when psychoanalysis was an important part of the cultural surround. Culture has transformed in vast ways in intervening decades, and psychoanalysis has become more and more marginalized as a public intellectual movement. Changes in the nature of family relations, work, and technology have all contributed to a shift in familial roles and identifications. Psychoanalytic ideas about oedipal and preoedipal identifications need to be reformulated. A current male, heterosexual, character type is described, which reflects cultural and familial changes. The household is one where both parents work, and are overstressed professionally and personally The man, a composite of cases seen and supervised, is a product of a contemporary family where the father disappointed the son, in the son’s eyes, through his self-absorption and neglect of his wife and family. The mother is a more sympathetic figure for the son, but not an object of identification. Traditional oedipal and preoedipal concepts of identification and conflict fail to capture the son’s dilemma in work and love. In a key dynamic, the son feels shame over the father’s failure as a parent and spouse. The shame becomes transformed within the son into guilt and fear of asserting himself and hurting women.

Paradox in the Pursuit of a Critical Theorization of the Development of Self in Family Relationships

Theory & Psychology, 2006

This article starts with my dissatisfaction with the post-structuralist treatment of the production of subjectivity within regulatory discourses and practices due to its neglect of psychological processes. Taking starting points from within the history set out in the previous article, it highlights the paradox for critical psychologists like myself involved in both applying a post-structuralist critique to ‘psy’ discourses and trying to theorize subjectivity in a way that goes beyond the dualism of individual and society, of psychology and sociology. The relational, or intersubjective, approach to self that originates in object relations psychoanalysis as it emerged in the mid-20th-century UK is central to both of these activities; object of the former and resource for the latter. I explore the paradox that this creates for critical psychology, both epistemological and ontological. In aiming to provide a psycho-social account of self in family relationships, I deploy the radical con...