ABSTRACT
To identify with someone is to believe their personality and character to have such affinities with one’s own that one can understand their situation, behaviour, motives, interests, etc. It also involves a close emotional empathy with their lives and fate, although identification exceeds empathy as such. Identification can be transient or enduring, and may occur simply when you become aware of somebody being in a situation very similar to one you have experienced. More broadly, however, and in a somewhat looser sense, one can be said to identify with a particular cause, one side in a controversy, or a football team, etc. In William James’s (1890) terms, to identify with someone or something is to treat it as an extension of one’s Self. (For another more technical sense, see also identification, under psychoanalysis.)
In Psychology, debates about this concept usually arise in the context of the question as to whether people possess a constant, enduring, personal identity or ‘I’. Sceptics argue that although we nearly all assume this to be the case, it is actually illusory, that our identity is in flux and constantly being recreated or reconstituted. This case is most powerfully raised by some in the social constructionism camp. It is very closely related to the Self concept, which has been the centre of a similar controversy, and the two terms are not always clearly differentiable. Basically, ‘Identity’ denotes the general principle of sameness over time, while ‘Self’ more specifically refers to the individual’s core character or personality. Identity is thus an ‘all or nothing’ thing – either we possess a single identity from the start or we do not – but ‘Self ’, for many psychologists, is more of a comprehensive psychological integration we strive to achieve, or modify over time. In the phrase dissociative identity disorder (see multiple personality disorder), however, the term is in effect synonymous with ‘Self ’. Here, ‘identity’ is being used more in its everyday sense of ‘who one is’ (as in ‘identity cards’, ‘identity theft’ or ‘false identity’). Another, philosophical, meaning is met with in the mind-body problem, in the phrase ‘mind-brain identity theory’, U.T. Place’s argument that mind-events or processes and brain-events or processes are identical.
