The Human Capacity to Identify with Others

To understand the human world, it is essential to understand the human capacity to IDENTIFY with other people.

By a kindred psychological mechanism, we also identify with larger collectivities—nations, religions, races. Our sense of “Us.”

A good deal of the world our species has developed is built upon that capacity.

Consider the many ways that our human capacity to experience things VICARIOUSLY shapes our world.

There would be no stories, were it not that we who hear stories can identify with these other people and experience things through them. When the hero punches the bad guy in the nose, we get the pleasure. When the guy and the girl finally kiss at the end of YOU’VE GOT MAIL, we are suffused with pleasure.

Sometimes that identification attaches itself to an admired individual. A famous Gatorade campaign built around Michael Jordan captured the feeling perfectly:

“Sometimes I dream that he is me…
I wanna be, I wanna be like Mike.”

Then there’s the “Us.”

The fans in the stadium are dressed in the team’s colors, part of a crowd of tens of thousands who have come to root for the home team—identifying with their city and showing their solidarity with everyone else on their side.

As a boy growing up in East Lansing, Michigan, I was crazy for the Michigan State teams. Even now, more than seventy years later, I still feel good when my Michigan State team wins—though I can see there’s nothing rational about it.

The bond of identification has proved permanent—beyond the reach of reason.

(Which is why I am not surprised that no amount of historical truth about the Confederate States of America, or the cause for which they fought, seems able to loosen the deep identification many people raised in the culture of the American South feel with the “heroes” of the Confederacy.)

Rooting for one’s team is a small reflection of a much larger form of identification. Americans identify as Americans, the French as French, Russians as Russians. Over the centuries, nations have depended—more or less—on people identifying strongly enough with their country to see its fate as their own, to feel a sense of unity with their countrymen, and—when necessary—to risk their lives in its defense.

Identification with the nation is a complex thing. “Patriotism” and “nationalism” have been necessary for social survival in the world of civilization. But both can be abused.

Whatever its role in politics, however, it is clear that our capacity to identify with other human beings lies at the heart of our moral capacity.

The idea of Identification is at the heart of Jesus’s most basic moral teaching: “Love thy Neighbor as Thyself.” And the notion of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” implies that you place yourself in another person’s position—identifying with them to assess what effect your conduct would have on them.

So this kind of experiential interconnection appears to be an important part of what we are as creatures. And that is a good thing, because empathy is much better for the world than indifference.

As Jesus’s teachings reveal, this capacity to identify with others is essential to the Good.

Our ability to put ourselves in other people’s place is essential to making human relationships and human society work. The tie that binds, the bonds that make life meaningful.

We can see the power of identification demonstrated also in how family culture uses identification to transmit, from generation to generation, the pattern for becoming a particular kind of human being.

Once again, with identifications acting as a primary means by which our basic humanity gets shaped into a particular form, there’s a “for better and for worse” aspect to it.

Anna Freud’s famous concept of “identification with the aggressor” is an example of “for worse.” Such identification can occur when a child is victimized by someone more powerful (usually a parent) and then, in an attempt to distance himself or herself from that painful and frightening victimhood, changes psychological posture to experience the situation from the vantage point of the abusive authority.

Identification with power can thus become an instrument of the Destructive Force at work in our world. The pattern established through “identification with the aggressor” can help a destructive leader found a cult of personality. Such a relationship between leader and followers depends on persuading large numbers of people to identify with him.
Hitler. The ecstatic crowd in Nuremberg. Mao. Thinking dictated by the Little Red Book.

And in our time — with Trump and his base — we have witnessed followers changing their views to align with whatever position the leader takes. This illustrates how, through identification, followers can empower the dictator to dictate their values and beliefs.

Identification is also key to understanding the evident gratification of many of Trump’s supporters for all the ways he “owns the libs.” Like the identification with the boxer in the ring, as he throws his punches.

So even though the human capacity for identification is crucial to what is best in our humanity, history is again showing how that same capacity can be exploited by Evil—as when destructive leaders harness the power of identification for their purposes.