Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Imprinting and Identification

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

The infant cannot produce a conscious mind just by itself: it needs the help of the mother. The production of an ego is a joint process involving the mother’s life experience and the infant’s innate dispositions.

The formation of an ego for the infant is a joint creation between mother and infant; it is the psychological interaction between mother and infant as felt by the infant. The infant’s emerging ego is a fusion of :

• Emotional dispositions and attitudes from the mother.


• Emotional dispositions, attitudes and character traits from the infant, carried over from its previous incarnations on Earth.


• The infant’s strength of will.

The infant’s ego is built in its basic form during the first eighteen months or so of its life. However, the ego is still fragile for some time afterwards as it continues to develop, gradually building its sense of identity by exploring what and who it is. The infant’s strength of will is an important factor; if the will is weakened and undermined by negative experiences in early childhood, then the child will incorporate some degree of fear at the core of it’s emerging ego. Such a child may become a weakling in times of stress. If the fear is intense enough, then the ego may have an underlying sense of powerlessness throughout life.

In forming its ego through the bonding process, the two main factors acting on the infant in its first years are imprinting and identification, and they sometimes overlap. At a later date, transference can add variety to the bonding process. I examine the factors of imprinting and identification in turn.

Imprinting

The infant needs love and other positive emotions, and so it absorbs the mother’s emotions. (The technical term for absorbing emotions from someone is called introjection). The infant needs to do this; if it is left unattended for long periods of time, as was the fashion in hospital maternity wards some time ago, then it experiences deep distress. But if it introjects unpleasant emotions from the mother then it also becomes distressed.

The need for love causes imprinting to occur. This need presents itself when jealousy, in its self-pity mode, is currently dominant in the baby.[¹]. What the infant receives from the mother is jealous love (jealousy in love mode). In any emotional dialogue between two people, the flow of emotion is from the person whose emotion is most intense at that moment to the person whose emotion is less intense (in exactly the same way that electricity flows through a circuit).

Why does imprinting occur? My interpretation is as follows. The reality of birth as experienced by the infant is that everything is subconscious and strange. The infant is on the receiving end of an endless succession of sensory stimuli which it does not know how to interpret. Since it has no conscious language, there are no “signs” or mental landmarks for the crystallising ego to anchor itself to. As adults, we interpret our sensory stimuli according to what we already know. We recognise a “house”, a “dog”, a “toy” because we have learned how to put a name to such objects or “signs”. Objects become landmarks in our world of endless sensory stimulation. Only through experience have we learned to separate the stimuli coming from any particular object from all the rest of the stimuli we are receiving. The infant has not yet begun the task of separating stimuli into separate objects. Therefore the psychological attachment to a parent, usually the mother, is the only possible response that the infant can make. In the total sensory confusion of the infant, the mother is the only “sign” in a signless world. The mother becomes an object that produces happiness in the infant.

What the infant takes mainly from the mother is the experience of her emotions: the regular repetition of pleasant emotions becomes the first “sign” that the infant can recognise. This is achieved through the medium of the auras. When two people are close enough together for their auras to blend then transfer of emotion is direct from one aura to the other one. This actuality is the situation that the infant always experiences – it is usually held close enough to the mother to be able to absorb her emotions.

Imprinting and Sexuality

When imprinting occurs, the flow of jealous love is from the mother ( jealousy in love mode) to the infant ( jealousy in self-pity mode) [²]. The self-pity mode indicates dependency; hence imprinting signifies the dependency of the child on the mother. But since this mode of jealousy is also associated with the arousal of sexual feelings, so imprinting also carries sexual overtones. Imprinting is a sexual form of bonding.

Hence the mother has a sexual effect on the infant that she is not aware of. The infant introjects the mother’s emotions. Both the mother’s emotions and the infant’s emotions include sexual ones. The infant experiences the flow of emotions, but it cannot distinguish their sources. It cannot distinguish between sexual emotions that arise from within itself from the sexual emotions that are absorbed from the mother. This is how the infant experiences sexuality; it fuses its sexuality with the mother’s sexuality. This fusion has a strong effect on the later process of identification. Once the child is old enough to begin identifying with the mother, it will take its cues on sexuality from its mother’s attitude to sexuality. The child may have to wait till later on in childhood or even puberty before its own sexuality can begin to develop in its unique way.

I put these ideas another way. In its early years, the child introjects the mother’s sexual feelings and attitudes, without being able to distinguish them from its own ones. The mother is a more powerful figure than the child is. Her attitudes become the signposts and boundaries that guide and shape the ways that the child can explore sexuality. Therefore, once identification with the mother begins, the long-term effect is that the mother establishes the pattern within which the sensitive child can form his sexual attitudes, that is, these attitudes are his responses to his mother’s pattern of feminine sexuality.

At puberty these attitudes are now externalised and projected outside the family. So from then on his sexual attitudes find harmony with a woman who reflects his mother’s attitudes, his mother’s femininity. Hence the mother imprints on the sensitive infant his pattern of sexuality. The usual term for this pattern is the Oedipus complex.

Imprinting is the primary source of his sexual happiness.
Identification is the primary source of his sexual identity.
Together they form the Oedipus complex.

The Oedipus complex still underlies his sexuality when puberty forces him to externalise his desires. The strength of this pattern relates to the intensity of imprinting, that is, the more intense it is, the more the source of happiness of the child is focused on the mother and her sexuality. When the child becomes an adult, he can accept this pattern or choose other modes of sexual relationships: the choice depends on how he handles sexual anxiety. If his sexual anxiety is minor, then he may choose a sexual partner using criteria such as wealth, prestige, fame, and other considerations: the partner may bear no resemblance to his mother. If his sexual anxiety is high, then he responds in a deterministic way, finding that he now prefers women who reflect his mother’s sexuality.

The infant’s emotions include narcissism and jealousy. Narcissism influences us to go our own way whilst jealousy is usually the basis of most social relationships. Which emotion becomes dominant depends mainly on the past life, the past incarnation of the infant (on whether, in that life, the person was an individualist or was socially-orientated). Narcissism will weaken the Oedipus complex, whilst jealousy will strengthen it. The difference between jealousy and narcissism explains why some young children are more interested in sexual behaviour and sexual desire than other children are. Those who show more sexual interest are those who have social interests, preferring jealousy to narcissism. A child who orientates on narcissism is likely to cultivate solitary interests and so will take much longer to attain a mature sexual identity than a child who prefers jealousy.

From Imprinting to Identification

Identification only becomes possible once the crystallising ego can begin to separate its emotions and responses from those of the mother. It is a form of bonding which has both sexual and non-sexual components, whereas imprinting is a sexual form of bonding. I give an interpretation of how they link up. So far I have been looking at the emotional factors in the bonding process. Now I need to bring in the factor of will, or will power.

During its creation, the ego is shaped by attitudes and beliefs that can support the will. Ideally, creating an ego means creating a consistent will, a will that is consistent in the evaluations that it has to make, more-or-less in the way that Nietzsche understood. [³]. Consistent attitudes and beliefs create a consistent will, which means that the ego will become a stable one. Whereas, confused and conflicting attitudes and beliefs generate an uncertain will and thereby form an ego that is potentially unstable.

Identification requires will and emotion; the preferred emotion is love, which means jealous love since such love is caring. The infant needs to switch from the self-pity mode of jealousy to the love mode of jealousy. To achieve this it takes the model of the mother’s will power as a surrogate for its own will. By focusing on will the child can orientate on jealous love, rather than on the dependency-creating self-pity mode of jealousy. In effect, the child uses its will to switch the mode of jealousy from self-pity to love.

Now I can link identification to imprinting.
Identification = will + sexual imprinting
    = will + jealousy (mode of love)

During periods when the infant cannot sustain identification then it becomes a whining child; jealousy remains in the self-pity mode.

Not all children are troubled to the same extent by identification. I assume that the intensity of identification correlates with the intensity of the child’s negative feelings about itself. The young child experiences periods of happiness and periods of unhappiness. The intensity of its unhappiness drives it to excessive identification with the parent as a way of mitigating its sorrows. This excessive identification means that the child is late in developing its own true sexuality. This delay produces an effect on the child when it becomes a young adult: it becomes hesitant and shy in its exploration of the social world, especially in its relationships with its peers of the opposite sex. As a young teenager, I had strong feelings of identification to my mother, due to my childhood sorrows. My dad was in the army, and so throughout my teens he and family regularly moved house; I went to one comprehensive school and two grammar schools, which were all single-sex schools. The emergence of my true sexuality was delayed till I went to university at age 19.

Effect of Envy

The child may identify with one or both of the parents. If a child does not significantly identify with both of the parents but feels attached to them, then the likely explanation is that there was little or no depth to its sorrows in infancy, so parent–child relations can be happy ones. Happiness leads to attachment, but not necessarily to identification. Attachment is the result of positive emotions, whilst identification originates from the need to escape from the self-pity mode of jealousy. Even for the happy child there is still some degree of identification, even if it is only of minor intensity, because of the effects of imprinting.

If the child identifies with one parent but not the other one (and does not feel any attachment to that parent), then a different pattern exists. The lack of identification indicates the likely presence of a dominant subconscious sense of envy towards that parent. Envy prevents a child from forming any strong bond or attachment to a significant adult. This envy is formed through the experience of rejection. When the child feels that it has been rejected by a parent, it can cut any existing psychological bonds with that parent by generating the envy. The generation of envy is done subconsciously and not by deliberate choice. [The effect of envy is different from the effect produced by hating a parent: hatred of a parent is still a bond, though a negative one].

A main difference between jealousy and envy is:
Jealousy facilitates bonding.
Envy prevents bonding.

If an infant does not experience any significant unhappiness in childhood, then its attachments to its parents may be genuinely positive and pleasurable ones. But there is a trade-off between happiness and unhappiness. Happy and pleasurable attachments will lack the intensity of the identification bond. So when the happy child becomes an adult its relationships to other adults are likely to lack intensity too. It may happen that a new relationship will have a short-lived intensity due to the novelty of it, but once the novelty wears off then so will the intensity. Prolonged intensity within a relationship is always the sign of identification, by which I mean that the relationship is fulfilling subconscious needs rather than conscious needs.

Roles of the Parents

One woman writer presumed that for a female child the mother gives it the sense of nurturing and the father gives it the sense of social relationships. In my view this is only partly correct. Bearing in mind her ideas on the father-daughter relationship, I assume that for heterosexual children:

• The child gets its sense of social relationships from the parent of the opposite sex to it.


• The child gets its sense of being an individual from the parent of the same sex to it.

These ideas suggest that for a boy his sense of individuality is a masculine one, whilst for a girl her sense of individuality is a feminine one.

[¹]. Jealousy is an emotion. My theory of emotion is detailed in the articles on Emotion on the Home page. [1]

[²]. The pattern of love flow is illustrated in the glossary. [2]

[³]. Blackham gives a good account of the process of creating a consistent will on page 25 of :
H.J. Blackham, Six Existentialist Thinkers, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952 and reprinted 1986. [3]

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