Conscious modeling is generally most effective only in less important aspects of life. We can reject the European or Midwestern cadences with which we were raised, substituting the tonier Eastern accents of our classmates or teachers, or for that matter, the ghetto-speak that seems cooler. We can tailor our clothes and cut our hair to whatever pattern is de rigeur for our generation. But most of what drives behavior in crucial areas will have been established earlier in life through less voluntary and rational means.
Modeling has minimal influence compared with the power of the automatic identification that goes on willy-nilly even when the child assumes he is rejecting the parental directives. Identification is a peculiar process. It operates on an unconscious and involuntary basis. A mother is likely to influence the design of her child through those areas of her behavior over which she, herself, has little or no conscious control. In governing the nature of her offspring, what she is will be more a determinant than what she wants. This concept of identification is so powerful that it mystifies parents, who are unaware of the distinctions between their instructions and their actions. A little girl will often behave as her mother wants her to behave out of fear of her mother or love for her. But that same little girl will behave like her mother—even if that may not be the way the mother wants her to behave—out of a strong and almost automatic process of identification. When a girl starts talking like her mother, employing her inflections and tonality, when she starts demonstrating the same walk and body language, it is not a conscious act of imitation. It just happens. It is a reflection of identification.
Identification is the most powerful of the behavior-determining forces.51 Most things are learned piecemeal, one at a time, through trial and error. With identification we learn automatically and with a “wholesale” adoption of the forms, habits, and even the values of the parents and the culture that shaped them. Through identification, we psychologically swallow up the parent—called “introjection” in psychoanalysis—and fuse his or her identity with our own. In this way we adopt behavioral patterns in big, indiscriminate blocks by incorporating the character and identity of others.
Identification, however, does not mean that we cannot reject aspects of our parents’ personalities. Rebellion and self-assertion are also a part of the growing-up process. In an elementary school every child “votes” the way his parents do. By high school one will find Democratic children of Republican parents, indicating both adolescent revolt and independent thinking. When a child insists on behaving in complete opposition to his parents, the behavior is a perverse form of dependency. Dependence can be expressed in defiance as well as obedience. When a child does something just because her parent objects, the parent is still the determinant in her behavior.
For the most part, even after allowing for rebellion and true independence, we retain more of the parents within us than we like to admit. This helps to explain the “hereditary” nature of personality—why Japanese children tend to grow up and behave like Japanese, whereas Swedish children persist in behaving like Swedes. It certainly explains the culture shock many of us feel on first being exposed to a culture significantly different from our own.
When we identify in this way, we are not only likely to talk, walk, dress in the manner of those with whom we have identified, but of more significance, we will tend to reason and think like them. We adopt not only the manners but also the mind-set of those with whom we identify, and we do it wholesale.
An admiration for certain traits sets a standard for a revulsion against others. Almost a century after the great massacres, Armenians—whose grandparents may have only known about the tragedy from second-hand sources—harbor an intrinsic distrust, even hatred, of the Turks. I am not offering this phenomenon as a universal finding, but its persistence even fractionally in a population four or five generations removed from the event is a tribute to the powers of identification.
The 2002 Nobel laureate in literature, Imre Kertesz, said in an interview: “My Judaism is very problematic. I am a nonbelieving Jew. Yet as a Jew I was taken to Auschwitz, as a Jew I was in the death camps and as a Jew I live in a society that does not like Jews.” He felt that to a large extent his Jewishness was “imposed” on him. Still, when he visited Israel, he was surprised by the power of his identification: “I am not impartial and, moreover, cannot be. I have never assumed the role of impartial executioner. I leave that to European—and non-European—intellectuals who embrace this role for better and often for worse. They have never bought a ticket for a bus ride from Jerusalem to Haifa.”52
The power of identification places a great burden on the leadership of major populations, whether on the national or religious scene. Group identification often depends upon the existence of an other, an outside, nonbelonging population. By setting an alien population outside the moral community, the leaders lay the groundwork for possible stigmatization and demonization of the other. The hatred of the Serbs for the Croats was inflamed by the active cooperation of the Croats with the Nazis. But the hostility between these two groups extended back to the Byzantine world, which separated the Greek Orthodox from the Roman Catholics. Since the split dates from the synod of Photius in 867 A.D., it is centuries before the life and personal memory of any living relatives. This hostility had to be abetted by the attitudes of the churches themselves, which have a longer memory for differences than for shared ideals. Certainly nothing was done within the institutions of the two churches to minimize the distinctions and mitigate the sense of alienation of these two closely related populations.
Under the iron rule of Tito, the newly founded state of Yugoslavia forged a union of groups that had existed in isolated hostility for generations. But as has been said by many, Tito was both the first and the last Yugoslav, and with his death the cultural hostilities that lay dormant emerged in bloody assaults on the traditional “enemies.” These hatreds are symptoms based on nothing in the real world, but on something in the internal world of identities and enemies.
Can anyone pretend to distinguish the Irish Protestant from his Catholic equivalent in physical appearance, speech patterns, Irish traits, Celtic humor, or even cultural values? Only when the discussion turns to religious politics do the enmity and the differences emerge. In an Irish-American bar, no one has any idea whether the Callahan or Kelly with whom one is speaking is Catholic or Protestant. The same is true for the traveler in Northern Ireland. A person’s roots become apparent only when the discussion turns political. Then the degree of hatred that can emerge is nothing short of astonishing. These hatreds were sucked into the unconscious of the younger generations along with the wholesale adoption of the personae of the elders through the processes of identification. A channel for “inherited” hatred was created between parent and child.
The identification that I have just briefly discussed I have labeled “upward identification.” That is not necessarily the most elegant term, but it is one that serves to contrast it with another and somewhat different form of identification called, naturally, “downward identification,” with which I will compare it. Downward identification is another thing entirely from the identification of the child with the parent.
What is one to make of the almost instant identification that the parent makes with the child at the moment of its birth? The experience I underwent on seeing my own children for the first time was an epiphany. It seemed more closely related to things I had read about than other experiences I could recall. It appeared much more akin to that instant bonding of a duckling for the first object it perceives moving than to traditional human modes of relating. Unlike friendship, which takes time to evolve; unlike love, which requires sharing, vulnerability, trust, and commitment—this had the quality of a mechanical or chemical reaction.
Why even call it identification? It does not have the trappings of the traditional identifications practiced by the child growing up. We don’t model ourselves after our children. We may adopt some of their interests, and we ought to be able
to be influenced by their sensibilities. But we don’t go through anything like the wholesale adoption of mannerisms, tastes, judgments, or values that is a part of the process of growing up. What relates the two forms of identification—upward and downward—is something called fusion.
The basic ingredient that defines identification is not the unconscious modeling, but the fusion of the stuff of our very self with the substance of another. Identity starts by knowing the toe we bite is a part of us, and the teething ring or a maternal nipple is something other. With fusion there is an erosion of the rigid boundaries of self, a blurring of the sense of the isolated “I,” or ego.
With upward identification, the child mentally “injests” the image of the parent and then fuses his own sense of self with that now-internalized image of his parent. The parental figure becomes a part of the self. So much a part, that the child, willy-nilly, takes over many of the attitudes and actions of the parent in an unthinking and wholesale manner. This “fusion” of the two identities is what is referred to as identification. Identification blurs the distinction between the perceived self and the incorporated person. It is nonetheless a selective process—there are multiple models we take in. And it is a gradual process, one of which the child is almost totally unaware.
With the downward identification that a parent feels on first seeing her newborn child, the process of fusion tends to be total, instantaneous, and wonderfully conscious. If anything, the confusion about where we end and the child begins is more profound in this direction than the other. With the identification of love, a union occurs that binds one’s fate to another’s. To praise my child offers me praise. To do damage to my child is to injure me and will cause me greater pain than to harm me directly. It may be the greatest pain. The grief over the loss of a child is the open, festering, and agonizing sore of Philoctetes—the wound that never heals.
For some reason, the response to my first grandchild is now more vivid in my memory than the birth of my own children. I had seen this child within an hour of his birth and with that seeing knew, not just understood, the meaning of biological imprinting. His image seemed to course through me like some secret message to an internal computer readjusting all the patterns of my consciousness. To the lifetime of experiences that had shaped my characteristic perceptions and behavior, a new experience had been added of such magnitude that a new sensibility, a changed me, was created. I knew that from that time on, that image was unshakably within me—an essential part of me—and, in some way that I did not yet understand, would inevitably alter, in ways that I could not predict, all my awareness and all my judgments.
What exactly happens in this identification with a child? I did not “swallow up,” introject, this grandchild, or my two daughters before him. I have done the opposite. I had somehow or other catapulted myself into their shells. I have inserted “me” into them. My children are containers, and fragile ones at that, which cradle, not just my hopes and my ambitions, my aspirations and my vanities, but my essential self. They are me. With this kind of identification, we have located our core within another corpus. We have placed our destiny in a body under someone else’s control. If my child does something foolhardy or willfully self-destructive, the pain will be experienced by hapless and innocent me. In great part this explains why no one is as capable of enraging us as our own children. They carry the helpless parent within them during all their reckless escapades. How dare she risk the purpose of my existence, my only immortality, my existential “meaning,” and the person I most cherish, by endangering herself? This explains the evident distress and horror of the mother of the suicide bomber, even as she is claiming pride for his action.
Downward identification has the power and tenacity that one associates with the fixed instincts of animals—biologically driven and species-preserving devices. Unfortunately, in this area too, downward identification can be modified and abandoned through the capacities of the human beings to change their very natures. Fortunately, it generally operates almost universally like a “maternal instinct.” It brings into play all the protective devices in a human mother to preserve her child, and thus the species. One can observe the same kind of behavior in the protective maneuvers of a doe. By protecting her offspring, the mother, animal or human, carries genes forward beyond the limited span of her lifetime. Her child will transport essential components of her self to her own children and the future generations.
These processes of identification are central in comprehending the limits of empathy and the contradictions of the workings of conscience. They help us understand our exquisite sensitivity to the pain of some and our indifference to—even our pleasure in—the pain of some others.
To complete an understanding of the mechanisms of empathy or indifference, I must introduce another principle of identification, particularly relevant to group identifications. I call this “proximal identification.” Proximal identification is not a moral principle but a psychological reality, an indisputable, universal phenomenon. It is best understood by comparing our varying responses to tragic events.
There is no question that an injury to my child, even of a relatively trivial sort, hurts me more than a more serious injury to the child of a stranger. In my sensibilities my child’s pain has a transcendent priority over your child’s pain. I am not pleased or proud of this observation—it represents a limit on my capacity for empathy—but I am convinced it is true for you as well as for me. When I extend the argument even further, it becomes more appalling, but no less true. A severe trauma to my child, a scarring that would affect her life throughout her existence, would cause me more grief than the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in the Sudan.
Let me clarify what I am saying. Of course I am distressed by the agony and injustices that have occurred in modern-day Africa, the starving in Somalia, the butchery and enslavement in the Sudan, the kidnapping and maiming of thousands of children in Sierra Leone, the slaughter of innocents in Rwanda and Burundi. When I witness these tragedies on the faces of real people through the pictures on television, or in my imagination while I am reading the newspaper accounts, a true sense of grief overcomes me. It is not simply an intellectual response. But this grief has a pathetically ephemeral existence. Although I may maintain my intellectual involvement and moral commitment through political and relief activities, my true and enduring emotions will not be the same as the pain caused by my everyday awareness of the injured child with whom I share my life. The most refined of consciences, the most overdeveloped capacity for guilt, will nonetheless rebuke our logical sense of justice and override our sense of proportionality when we deal with the suffering of those we know and love—our own—in comparison with the suffering of some distant others.
We are grieved by the everyday, by what we see, and what is close. The priority of the news media in focusing on local over international news is a testament to the interests of their audiences. More true grief and tears are generated by the discovery of the body of a murdered child in the neighborhood than of hundreds of children killed in floods in Bangladesh. The nearby disaster has more meaning, even though lesser than the distant one. It is not a new idea. Hume observed more than two hundred years ago, “Pity depends, in a great measure, on the contiguity and even sight of the object.”53 And certainly the capacity for television to bring disaster into our very homes has expanded the population of those with whom we can identify.
Although proximal identification may not require the physical proximity to or sight of the individual that Hume suggested, it certainly requires something comparable, a clearly defined kinship, for example. Such kinship may allow us to identify with people we have never known. We can identify with those in a future too far for us to envision and back to a past we never experienced. The chaotic and random killings in Northern Ireland, taking the lives of hundreds of innocents, inevitably touched the hearts of Irish Americans who had never been in Ireland more than the loss of a hundred thousand lives in Iran. A terrorist
bomb exploded in a bus full of Israeli children feels like a personal blow to an American Jew who has never been to Israel.
These ethnic and religious identifications—with the limitation of empathy they suggest—can be seen as deriving from important survival patterns built into our genetic matrix before the emergence of modern culture. Proximal identification may seem irrational and unjust in our current period, when we are approaching a global culture, but it was a biological necessity at an earlier period. Without it we could not have saved the species in those days of limited awareness of space and even more limited vision of the world as a whole. We preserved the species by each protecting his own. The units of survival in prehistoric times were much smaller than those of today. There were no nations, and there was no consideration of the universality of mankind. There were only family clusters, no “family of man.” Survival of the species, particularly through the protection of the vulnerable young on whom the future rests, demands an overvaluation of the needs of those young who are our own specific charges.
We can see that among herding animals, the herd is best protected when the antelope protects her offspring, and hers alone, from the marauding lion. If every mother were concerned about all the young—the general welfare—none would survive. The propensity of human beings to overvalue their own is part of the biological inheritance we share with lower communal animals.
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