ABSTRACT
Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Although Kenneth Burke never denounced Sigmund Freud and loved him to the end, his anxiety of influence did take a parricidal turn, which expressed itself—in part and interestingly enough—in Burke's own theory of identification, which he himself described as "post-Freudian". Burke describes identity as an effect of the processes of identification and identification as the achievement of an already discernable "identity". "The effects of the first identifications made in earliest childhood will be general and lasting", Freud writes a few years later in The Ego and the Id. What Freud shows but cannot quite embrace is that "the sympathetic bond" of identification is precisely what remains when the Leader/hypnotist is subtracted from the equation. According to Freud, the relation to alterity is born, in the interruption of narcissistic appropriation, in a disidentification that serves as the condition for symbolic intervention.
