New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

152 PSYCHOANALYSIS
its totality (as in identifying with an individual), or partially (as in the
assumption of a physical trait or characteristic). According to Laplanche
and Pontalis, the subject “is transformed, wholly or partially, after the
model the other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications that
the personality is constituted and specified” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1978:
205).
Because identification, the earliest emotional tie in the life of the subject,
plays a central role in the imaginary formation of the ego (in spite of the
fact that Freud himself was never completely satisfied with either its
definition or its place among other processes of the psyche), psychoanalytic
film theory accords it a central place in its conception of the spectator’s
imaginary access to the film. Thus, for Alain Bergala,
[I]dentification is both the basic mechanism of the imaginary
constitution of the ego (a founding function) and the core, the
prototype of a number of subsequent psychical instances and
processes through which the ego, once constituted, continues to
differentiate itself (a matrix function).
(in Aumont et al. 1983:174)
For Freud (provisionally), primary identification involves an early mode of
the constitution of the self on the model of another person, and as such, an
early form of affective relationship to an object, before there is any real
distinction between self and object. It is pre-Oedipal, bound up with oral
incorporation, and characterized by a certain amount of confusion between
the ego and the other. It is distinct from the type of identification in
Lacan’s mirror phase, because for Lacan it is here that the dual relationship
between the ego and the other, between subject and object (a relationship of
similarity and difference) is established. This first differentiation of the
subject begins on the basis of an identification with an image in an
immediate, dual and reciprocal relation, but it depends, precisely, on a
recognition of the self as distinct and distanced from the image. However,
there is also a sense in which this is primary identification as well (the
affinities between the descriptions make this clear).
Another way of clarifying the issue is to think in terms of the distinction
between the ideal ego (associated with the pre-Oedipal and the imaginary)
and the ego ideal (associated with the punitive paternal function in the
Oedipal complex and emerging in the symbolic). Although these
distinctions are not very clear in most of the literature, thinking of primary
identification in relation to the ideal ego associates it with an early
idealization of the self, while the processes involving the ego ideal concern
identification-with parents, their substitutes, or collective ideals as models
with which the subject attempts to conform, processes more aligned with
secondary identification.