Abstract
In general speech, ‘identification’, as the noun of the verb ‘to identify’, refers to two processes which are apparently quite distinct. There is on the one hand the process of identifying things as objects, that is, as different or similar from each other in, for example, the categorising of species as mammals, insects etc. On the other hand the term refers to a process of making oneself the same as, to identify oneself with something else (the Latin root of the work means literally ‘to make the same’). This can be summed up as the difference between saying T identify that man as my father’ and ‘I identify with my father’. These two processes in fact involve a common element, namely the statement T am not my father’. In order to identify, to make the same, an acknowledgement of difference is required implying a separation prior to any assimilation with the object of identification. As a result, and in this gap, a psychological process comes into play.
A path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life. (Sigmund Freud)1
It is always through some transfer from Same to Other, in empathy and imagination, that the Other that is foreign to me is brought closer. (Paul Ricoeur)2
‘You’ve always been like that, able to think with my thoughts and feel with my feelings’ Thorley declares to her childhood sweetheart, Jeb Rand, in Pursued (Raoul Walsh, 1947).
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Notes and References
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), SE, vol. XVIII, p. 110, note 2.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–8), vol. 3, p. 184.
This has been suggested by Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970), trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 80.
Jean Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1967), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), p. 205.
Jaques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1973), trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1977), p. 100.
Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940 [1938]), SE, vol. XXIII, p. 150. The concept of a reservoir of libido is problematic, however, and this issue is discussed further in Chapter 5.
This is made clear by Lacan, cit Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Imaginary’ (1975), in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), p. 186, from ‘Remarque sur le rapport de Daniel Lagache: “Psychanalyse et structure de la personnalit锑 (1960), Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), p. 678.
Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 106.
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1969), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 160. The problems in attempting to map Lacan’s real, imaginary and symbolic on to social forms and forces is taken up again in Chapter 8.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 4.
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (1977), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), pp. 129–30.
Hugo Münsterberg, The Film, A Psychological Study (1916) (New York: Dover, 1970), p. 53.
Richard Wollheim, ‘Imagination and Identification’, in On Art and the Mind (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 67. Wollheim is concerned here to distinguish the role of imagination or imagining in identification, and posits two forms of imagination — central, where one imagines the object, experience or process itself, that is, one sees it in one’s mind’s eye, or and by extension, one imagines oneself or someone else doing something. Wollheim further suggests that ‘it is a mark of the character whom I centrally imagine that in imagining what he does I also imagine what he feels and thinks’, p. 59. His second form of imagining arises where one imagines someone doing something but ‘where no one is centrally imagined, I shall think of [these] as cases where I imagine that….’, p. 59. This ‘acentral’ imagining is associated with the process of sympathy, while ‘central’ imagining is placed with empathy and related to the processes of identification described by Freud as regressive identification with the lost love object which Wollheim considers through Freud’s account of Leonardo da Vinci. Wolheim also uses his category of central imagining to distinguish between projection and projective identification. As a result he sees as instances of central imagining situations where the individual imagines himself or herself as another without thereby being the person. For this he draws on the notion of a ‘master thought’ which functions here in a way which is similar to that which I will propose for fantasy in relation to identification in cinema. As a result while fantasy is an ‘as if relation of imagining it is nevertheless a form of central imagining, it is empathy, not sympathy.
Smith proposes a tripartite structure, commencing with ‘recognition’, or the construction of characters on the basis of (1) a mimetic hypothesis — that the fictional figure is likely to be similar to ‘real’ persons, and (2) according to a ‘person schema’, a basic schema of what we expect a person to be. It is clear that some process of this kind is involved in cultural interaction, whether in relation to fictional or to ‘real’ persons, but how we understand the human subject, or ‘person’ is much more controversial. Moreover the extent to which we ‘recognise’ a particular fictional character-array within a larger overall person schema may depend on the way in which the narrative text has organised knowledge of the character to enable certain connotative connections, so that the order and conjunction of information is important. Having established the spectator’s engagement with a character, Smith distinguishes between empathy, which he sees as increasingly involuntary, and sympathy, within which the processes of alignment and allegiance arise, hence it is primarily a cognitive process and, as he demonstrates, is culturally determined. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Daniel Dayan, ‘The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema’, Film Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, Fall 1974, p. 22. The 180-degree rule was a recognised norm within classical Hollywood cinema and a central convention of scene dissection or anlytical editing, itself a Hollywood norm of good film-making. It requires that, when cutting within a scene from one character to another character or an object, a line is posited between the characters — typically motivated as a character’s glance, whether at another character or at an object — which the camera should not cross; instead the camera is moved only within the 180 degrees on one side of the line or eyeline. The rule is intended to ensure in the spectator a sense of continuity of space between shots, which can be disrupted if in a reverse-shot the camera crosses the implied eyeline, opening up previously unknown space behind a character. This emphasis on continuity and with it the avoidance of foregrounding the role of the camera or of editing has — wrongly — been made homologous to the ‘seamless stitching’ of the suturing of the subject.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973), trans. Richard Miller, (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), p. 47.
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© 1997 Elizabeth Cowie
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Cowie, E. (1997). Identifying in the Cinema. In: Representing the Woman. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25269-5_4
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