Identification With The Aggressor: Becoming Someone Else After Trauma

When living through chronic, ongoing trauma during childhood, our mind will do whatever it takes to survive. The threat of emotional, psychological, or physical annihilation is too much to bear. When those traumatic experiences, whether marked by abuse or neglect, take place in the relationships we depend on to live, we face an impossible situation: our existence depends on maintaining the attachment to those whose presence we fear or whose absence we dread.

The impact of complex relational trauma becomes part of who we are, intrinsically embedded in our psyche, our body, our sense of self, and in the fabric of the relationship with ourselves and others. In order to feel safe, we may become very skilled, often unconsciously, at reading other people’s minds, guessing what they want from us, and complying with their desires. We might meet other people’s needs through appeasement, submission, or caretaking, or by becoming disconnected from our own needs, wishes, conflicts, and longings. We learned that by prioritizing others, we stood a chance to remain safe and unharmed, preventing the possibility of rejection, disappointment, or violence.

In recent years, this type of reaction has been associated with the so-called “fawn” response to complex trauma, characterized as a defensive and protective reaction that aims at appeasing or pleasing others in order to feel safe. However, this concept is not new. This kind of process has been recognized by psychoanalysis for decades, particularly through the concept of Identification with the Aggressor, as introduced by Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in 1932 when talking about his work with survivors of sexual abuse. This concept provides a helpful and broader way of understanding what happens in our mind when we experience ongoing, relational childhood trauma.

It can also be useful beyond what would typically be considered severe traumatic experiences (Frankel, 2002, 2004). For example, when instead of unspeakable terror, gross neglect, or sexual abuse, our childhood was shaped by ongoing fear, chronic loneliness, perpetual disappointment, or impinging misattunement. The impact of those experiences, even if not lived as traumatic, can run deeply and have complex ramifications into our personality, our identity, and our relationships. Ferenczi’s ideas can help us make sense of such entanglement and provide a perspective on how therapy can help.

What Is Identification With The Aggressor?

A common use of this term refers to the ways in which, often unconsciously, people in general and trauma survivors in particular might “identify” with their aggressors through mimicry. For example, a child victim of verbal abuse who becomes verbally abusive towards others, might be imitating the behaviors he was subjected to, as an attempt to experience a sense of safety (other defense mechanisms, such as displacement, might also be at play). Identification with the Aggressor is, in this way, understood as a form of imitation of behaviors or ways of being.

Ferenczi understood Identification with the Aggressor differently. He observed that many victims of childhood sexual abuse experienced helplessness and anxiety in the relationship with their abusers, to the point of “[subordinating] themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious to themselves they identify themselves with the aggressor” (Ferenczi, 1949, p.228). As psychoanalyst Jay Frankel (2002) puts is, “we stop being ourselves and transform ourselves into someone else’s image of us” (p.102). In order to be safe from abuse, the child needs to learn what is expected of them and become who the adult needs them to be, by “identifying” with the adult’s needs, expectations, demands, and desires.

This is not a conscious process, a decision, or a choice the child makes. The process of identification is unconscious and automatic, getting reinforced with each interaction, particularly when no other adult is available to witness, protect, or help make sense of the experience, or when the abuse if denied, minimized, or invalidated. The child will develop a very acute sensibility to other people’s moods, anticipating the other’s demands and expectations, and accommodating their own self to what they consciously or unconsciously perceive that the aggressor requires from them.

Psychoanalyst and trauma expert Elizabeth Howell (2014) notes that Ferenczi does not talk about healthy identification that supports the child’s developing sense of self and identity. Instead, traumatic Identification with the Aggressor is a response to events that cannot be assimilated into narrative memory, but instead remain unlinked and dissociated (more on dissociation later).

While Ferenczi introduced this concept in the context of childhood sexual abuse, the process of Identification with the Aggressor can certainly occur when other forms of abuse are present, such as verbal abuse or emotional manipulation. More broadly, Frankel (2002, 2004) has noted that this process can take place beyond what would usually be considered “traumatic.” He suggests that the potential for aggression, abuse, neglect, rejection, or abandonment is always present when there is a perceived power differential in a relationship. During adulthood, this potential might unconsciously activate relational patterns forged during our earlier relationships.

It is important to emphasize that for Ferenczi (1949), in addition to the presence of “aggression,” what feels unbearable to the child is feeling “lonely and abandoned in his greatest need” (p.227). Abandonment can take many forms, including minimization of the abuse, denial of the child’s reality, or parental collusion to preserve the “good standing” of the abuser. Frankel (2004) suggests that Ferenczi believed in children’s resilience “as long as there is someone with whom to share one’s fear and pain” (p.79). The absence of recognition, holding, and containment of the child’s traumatic experience is, by itself, annihilating (Gurevich, 2015).

Beyond People Pleasing

Through the process of Identification with the Aggressor, the child molds and subjugates their sense of self and their subjectivity to the needs of the adult. In adult relationships, this traumatic accommodation might be translated into what is popularly called “people pleasing,” an attempt to appease others by prioritizing their needs.

However, the ramifications of this identificatory process are broader. In order to become who others needs him to be, in order to stay safe from hurt, loss, abandonment, or violence, the child must develop an acute sensitivity to the other person’s needs, wishes, moods, and feelings. What might look like precocious maturity, empathy, or “wisdom” might be an expression of the ways in which the child needed to change to ensure their emotional, psychological, and physical survival. In Ferenczi’s words, “the fear of the uninhibited, almost mad adult changes the child, so to speak, into a psychiatrist and, in order to […] defend himself against […] people without self-control, he must know how to identify himself completely with them” (1949, p.229).

The concept of identification with the aggressor can also apply to situations in which the “aggression” is not defined by abuse, but by neglect, rejection, or emotional unavailability. For example, in order to be safe from the threat of abandonment and despair, the child of a depressed parent can assume caretaking qualities or shape his personality hoping that he can enliven his emotionally unavailable caregiver. As Ferenczi (1949) put it, “a mother complaining of her constant miseries can create a nurse for life out of her child” (p.228). Either by needing to become the parents’ psychiatrist or nurse, the child takes on a parentified role as he is made responsible for molding himself to the needs, expectations, and wishes of the adult.

Becoming empathic or nurturing, or identifying with aspects of our parents and their wishes for us, can under normal circumstances augment and enhance our sense of self and identity. However, they can be expressions of traumatic experiences when they develop in order to preserve a sense of safety and avoid existential threat. As Frankel (2004) notes, “as these capacities [empathy, attunement, etc.] are gained, the victim’s contact with his own emotional life is lost” (p.79). During adulthood, this might be experienced as having a limited relationship with ourselves, feeling unsure of our own needs and wants, or engaging in masochistic relationships.

At the center of the process of Identification with the Aggressor, lies for the child the urgent and imperative task to meet the adult’s narcissistic needs. Narcissistic needs of the parent might include feeling powerful, needed, useful, alive, desirable, or loved. Children become extensions of their parents’ needs, and experience themselves not as individuals but “as an object of use for the caretaker, rather than a person of intrinsic value” (Howell, 2014, p.52). This results in a diminished sense of agency, identity, and self-cohesion, which can be carried into adulthood.

Thus, Identification with the Aggressor might lead to more than just developing a submissive or appeasing disposition. For example, a former patient of mine undermined her own sense of agency and decision making, as she learned during childhood that she needed to remain dependent of a parent who reacted ragefully at her early attempts to become her own person. Or a different patient, whose parents could not tolerate his dependence and avoided facing their own fears and longings, became the detached and self-sufficient person his parents needed him to be.

The Aggressor Within

As part of normal development, we internalize different aspects of the relationships with our parents and other significant figures in our early life. These mental representations become a “cast of characters” in our mind that underlies our attachment patterns, our sense of self in relation to others, and what we learn to anticipate from the world. Over time, these internalizations might be modified through our personal growth and new relational experiences.

During early trauma, Ferenczi (1949) suggests, if children feel overwhelmed and helpless, they will deal with the traumatic situation “by anxiety-ridden identification and by introjection [internalization] of the menacing person or aggressor” (p.228, italics in the original). The child will unconsciously internalize the aggressor as an attempt to seek safety and self-regulate: by making them “disappear” as an element of their external reality and turning them into an unconscious mental representation, the feelings evoked by existential threat can be managed.

If identification involves knowing the aggressor “from the inside” in order to adapt to external reality, internalization involves bringing the aggressor into our mind in order to cope with the anxiety and terror of trauma (Frankel, 2002). As a result, a part of us will become an internalized aggressor, who will punish, threaten, or abuse ourselves from within, so that we can continue to experience the external adult/aggressor as loving and safe.

In addition to seeking safety and regulating overwhelming anxiety, internalization allows the child to preserve the attachment with the adult. After all, the child depends on that relationship for their psychic, emotional, and physical survival. However, this effort requires the child to split the “good” and “bad” parts of the internalized aggressor. The former allows the child’s longing for love to survive and be fulfilled, even if in fantasy, by an adult/aggressor who can become loved, loving, or idealized. The latter allows him to continue fighting the abuser in the arena of his own mind. However, this process perpetuates the traumatic experience (Frankel, 2002), becoming part of the fabric of the relationship with ourselves and others.

It is important to note that what is internalized is not only a representation of the other (i.e., the aggressor) but also a representation of ourselves in relation to the other. In other words, what becomes internalized, both as part of normal development and of traumatic experience, are relational configurations of self and other, what psychoanalysts have called “internal object relations” (see Ogden, 1983).

Through the unconscious splitting of the adult, the child will develop an unconscious relational configuration involving an “all good,” loving, and idealized “other” who exists, in the child’s mind, in relation with a “self” that was not only molded to meet the aggressor’s needs and desires, but that also takes on the burden of “badness” of the aggressor. As Ferenczi (1949) put it, “the most important change, produced in the mind of the child by the anxiety-fear-ridden identification with the adult partner, is the introjection [internalization] of the guilt feelings of the adult” (p. 228, italics in the original).

Whether the adult aggressor actually experiences guilt is questionable. However, I believe the point here is broader: the process of traumatic Identification with the Aggressor leaves the child feeling responsible for any hurtful, disappointing, or traumatic experiences as he internalizes the “badness” of the adult/aggressor, filling the child with a deep sense of shame, guilt, and worthlessness which usually persists through adulthood.

The child’s mind must do this in order to keep a positive representation of their parents since their survival depends on it: acknowledging the failures of those we depend on emotionally, psychologically, and physically, would put our own existence in unbearable risk. As psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbarn put it, for the child “it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God, than a saint in a world ruled by the Devil” (1944, cited by Howell, 2014, p.53). The former scenario keeps the “badness” within the child, but provides the security that the world is “good,” allowing the child to hold on to hope for his own survival.

Another relational configuration that develops in the child’s mind is defined by the actual traumatic experience: an overpowering, abusive, frightening, disappointing, or rejecting aggressor lives in relation to a child overwhelmed by terror, disappointment, helplessness, loneliness, or sorrow. This internalized relationship remains unconscious and is somatically registered, split off from awareness as the result of trauma.

Decades after Ferenczi’s original ideas, Attachment Theory also observed the ways in which “the child keeps in consciousness favorable views of the parents while knowledge of the bad or disappointing aspects of the parents is excluded” (Howell, 2014, p.53). Object relations theorists, such as Fairbarn, developed the complexity of our world of introjects and self-representations beyond a good/bad binary, understanding unconscious splitting as a way to help the child manage their attachments.

Identification And Dissociation

Infant research has shown how we attempt to relate to others from the beginning (see Beebe & Lachmann, 1998). Not only we seek to relate to our caregivers, but we learn about who we are through those relationships. In that context, processes of conscious or unconscious identification are an intrinsic part of psychological and emotional development.

We may want to emulate aspects of our parents or, closer to Ferenczi’s understanding of “identification,” we may learn what is hoped for and expected of us. When this is met with our parents’ recognition of our own needs, individuality, subjectivity, and emerging personality, this will likely result, as mentioned earlier, in a healthy expansion of our sense of self and identity.

However, when our parent’s ability to meet our needs for connection and recognition are compromised, their expectations, fantasies, needs, and desires can be experienced as oppressive or threatening. This is especially the case when there is ongoing abuse or neglect. Under those circumstances, the effect of identificatory processes is not expansion but dissociation.

Children must dissociate their own experience, evacuating their own sense of self, needs, wishes, and feelings in order to become who the aggressor needs them to be, by turning “completely oblivious of themselves” (Ferenczi, 1949, p.228). The child’s attuned identification with the aggressor informs which experiences, feelings, or thoughts must be dissociated (Frankel, 2004).

Something fundamental shifts in the child’s mind and sense of self. Bonomi (2002) suggests that “the world of wishes and desires is destroyed in the traumatic experience” (p.157). The child’s wishes and desires to engage with their caregivers become an impossibility. The child needs to dissociate their own experience and emotions as a matter of self-regulation and survival (Frankel, 2002). Not only the pain, hurt, sadness, and fear are too intense to enter consciousness, but they might endanger the child if they were somehow expressed, so they must be either forgotten or never experienced.

Trauma leaves the child “enormously confused, in fact, split – innocent and culpable at the same time – and his confidence in the testimony of his own senses is broken” (Ferenczi, 1949, p.228). The mistrust in and confusion about their own experiences, perceptions, feelings, and needs are very common in many of the people therapists work with.

The picture gets more complicated when we consider how Identification with the Aggressor involves not only intrapsychic dissociative processes, but relational ones. During childhood, our experiences with significant others will generate an “unconscious enactive, procedural, relational knowing” (Howell, 2014, p.50) that defines different ways of being and of experiencing ourselves in relation to others.

Under “good enough” circumstances, these ways of being (also called “self-states”) are linked to each other, providing a sense of internal continuity. As we experience multiple aspects of relationships, we will develop a multiplicity of self-states. While some of them might be harder to access (e.g., those defined by shame, fear, or hurt), we can experience a relative ease flowing between them.

Following traumatic experiences, however, this type of “relational knowing” becomes fragmented, leading to a disjointed sense of self. Our self-states are experienced as discontinuous, discrete entities within our own mind, some of which might remain dissociated. The internalized representations of self and others are connected to self-states that remain split and unintegrated.

Feelings of shame, longing, terror, and rage had to be hidden in the realm of the unthinkable, separate from consciousness and leading to strong defenses to keep a sense of safety and some semblance of cohesiveness. Harsh, punitive self-critics, our own internalized aggressors, are the remnants of what we had to do to stay alive and manage the painful reality of fearing those we loved and needing those who were not there for us. The relational patterns manifested in the “outside” world (e.g., fear of others, shame) also reflect relations between different parts of the self (Gurevich, 2015).

When traumatic experiences are more severe and, especially, when there was nobody to soothe us, protect us, witness, or help us make sense of what happened, our identifications, internalizations, and dissociation becomes more intense. We feel fragmented and scattered, oscillating between feeling like a helpless victim and becoming the abuser ourselves (Howell, 2014), reacting with intense pain and rage at the possibility of being hurt or abandoned one more time. Intense versions of this can be observed in borderline personality organizations or in dissociative identity disorder, but the degree of fragmentation, splitting, and dissociation follows a continuum within all of us as part of our human nature.

What This Means For Therapy

The work to disentangle the complexity created by the dynamics of identification, internalization, and dissociation as described by Ferenczi is challenging. These processes are unconscious and the experiences they are based on may have never been integrated to our personal narrative and sense of self. At the same time, they became embedded in the fabric of our personality, our relationships, and how it feels to be in the world.

Since the depth and complexity of these experiences remain unspoken, unthinkable, unformulated, and disconnected from consciousness, the work will unlikely be accomplished by only attempting to change conscious thoughts and behaviors. Somatic approaches, on the other hand, can be essential to restore a sense of safety and improve self-regulation, offering an experience of stabilization that can be life changing (Fisher, 2017).

However, Identification with the Aggressor is, at its core, a relational phenomenon with a profound impact on our psyche. What at first developed automatically in early traumatic relationships, became defensive and purposeful in later ones (Howell, 2014). As a result, these dynamics will unavoidably become part of the therapeutic relationship if therapists listen carefully and openly. This provides an opportunity to work through these relational wounds from the inside out in the relational context of therapy. Within the framework usually accepted by complex trauma experts (e.g., Cloitre et al, 2012), these relational dynamics would likely play a central aspect of the phases of processing, re-appraisal, and integration of traumatic experiences.

Ferenczi (1949) recognized the ways in which Identification with the Aggressor can be present in the therapeutic relationship: “patients have an exceedingly refined sensitivity for the wishes, tendencies, whims, sympathies and antipathies of their [therapist]. Instead of contradicting the [therapist] or accusing him of errors and blindness, the patients identify themselves with him” (p.226, italics in original).

This observation resonates with what I see in my practice: patients tend to have a hard time disagreeing, confronting, criticizing, or expressing anger, distrust, or disapproval towards their therapist. There might be multiple reasons for this, particular to each therapeutic dyad, but I believe the concept of Identification with the Aggressor is one worth considering.

At the same time, it can be very difficult for therapists to see ourselves as potential “aggressors” in our patient’s minds, as an “other” whose needs and wishes can become subjugating, since that goes against the ways we would like to see ourselves: genuinely attuned, empathic, caring, selfless, or healing. I believe that our personal investment in this kind of self-representation might, at times, promote idealization, envy, and shame in our patients, leading to a repetition -unthinkable and unspeakable- or their traumatic experiences.

This kind of idealization has long been recognized by psychoanalysis as part of the therapeutic process. It can be, however, a set up for a re-enactment of the Identification with the Aggressor process, as our patients might “feel they must collude with the [therapist’s] mask of goodness” (Frankel, 2004, p.80). Pretending, consciously or not, that we don’t at times struggle with or feel disturbed by certain aspects of our patients and ourselves, is part of what Ferenczi (1949) called our “professional hypocrisy” (p.226).

Frankel (2002, 2004) has argued that the power differential intrinsic, yet often unacknowledged, in the therapeutic relationship, can set the stage for Identification with the Aggressor. Attempts to address this imbalance by eroding it are complicated. For example, trauma psychoeducation as an intervention can be useful and a way to address the power imbalance by not keeping the therapist as the only holder of knowledge (Fisher, 2017). However, I wonder if at times it can have the opposite unconscious effect, furthering our patients’ tendency to become more agreeable and compliant, at the expense of other parts of their experience of the therapist.

Efforts to “connect” with our patients, such as bending the boundaries of the relationship, engaging in reflexive self-disclosure, or feeling rushed to provide the advice they seek, can be equally problematic. These attempts often stem from the therapist’s own anxieties and needs, which become prioritized, potentially colluding with a repetition of Identification with the Aggressor. Our attachment to our beliefs about how therapy should look like, what theory or modality should be used, what kind of therapist we ought to be, how the patient must behave, or what shape their journey should take – they all increase the potential for this kind of enactment.

Instead, Ferenczi was ahead of his time by suggesting that therapy can provide a space where the here-and-now of the therapeutic relationship can and should be examined. This can help our patients develop trust and, over time, the ability to experience previously dissociated states in a new relational context.

This process will likely involve ongoing experiences of rupture and repair with the therapist, of meeting and missing each other at times. Misattunements, conflicts and enactments inevitably emerge sooner or later, as intellectual defenses become less effective (Ferenczi, 1931). Part of why this is inevitable is because the process of Identification with the Aggressor does not work perfectly: “behind the submissiveness or even the adoration,” Ferenczi (1949) writes, part of the child will hold “an ardent desire to get rid of this oppressive love” (p.229).

The therapeutic relationship has been established as a main factor of change (see Norcross & Lambert, 2018), but Ferenczi, and psychoanalysis as a whole, encourages us to consider this broadly, beyond finding ways to collaborate, support, and empathize with our patients. Working relationally involves not only recognizing the importance of early relationships in shaping who we become, but understanding that what our patients do or say cannot be decontextualized from the vicissitudes of the specific therapeutic relationship (Frankel, 2004).

It also means that therapists need to be willing to examine their own feelings and reactions, and to explore the depths of their own dissociated, troubling states in the service of their patient’s healing. As therapists, our countertransference is not only unavoidable but essential in helping the people we work with, not an undesirable phenomenon that must always be curbed aside.

From this point of view, working through complex trauma in therapy goes beyond mastering skills, achieving self-regulation, or gaining insight into the past. Bringing back and processing older memories is, at times, less the point. The “memories” that may matter most are not episodic, fragments of our past we might be able to recall, but procedural, intrinsically linked to the person we became, how we feel in the world, and how we relate towards ourselves and others. As Freud (1914) suggested a long time ago, repeating these unconscious and deeply rooted patterns is in itself a form of remembering.

As a result of identification with the aggressor, the “other” will be “repeatedly experienced as an ever-present threatening aggressor, demanding compliance, submission, and subjugation” (Gurevich, 2015). The therapist is an “other” that can be experienced in a similar way; this is not a problem in itself, but part of the therapeutic process. I believe that therapists who don’t consider this can happen between them and their patients, that their relationship is somehow exempt from the pressures of history and trauma, do so at their own peril and to the detriment of the people they are trying to help.

However, the therapist might also become an “other” who will hopefully be able to hold the patient’s experience and reality, while acknowledging and grappling with their own. It behooves the therapist to own up to their own struggles, challenges, shortcomings, mistakes, failures, vulnerabilities, and retraumatizing potential through this process. Whether we openly discuss this with our patients or not is a separate question, but we must be open to feel disturbed by what we find within ourselves if we are to connect with our patient’s disturbed states. This can be very difficult but is necessary if we are to develop, jointly with our patients, a relationship based on mutuality.

Therapy is not only about linking past events to present experiences, or about imagining a different future with a renewed sense of hope and agency. It is also a space where two minds can meet, confront, and survive the deeply familiar fear of breakdown, disaster, and annihilation. This requires the therapist to truly join their patients in their dissociated despair, desperation, rage, dread, and desire. This kind of genuine joining and deep witnessing, while potentially disturbing for both parties, can afford our patients the experience -perhaps for the first time- of not having to hide or become someone they are not.

References

Beebe, B. & Lachmann, F.M. (1998). Co-Constructing Inner and Relational Processes: Self- and Mutual Regulation in Infant Research and Adult Treatment. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 15(4), 480-516.

Bonomi, C. (2002). Identification with the aggressor – an interactive tactic or an intrapsychic bomb? Commentary on paper by Jay Frankel. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(1), 153-158.

Cloitre, M., Courtois, C.A., Ford, J.D., Green, B.L., Alexander, P., Briere, J., Herman, J.L., Lanius, R., Stolbach, B.C., Spinazzola, J., Van der Kolk, B.A., Van der Hart, O. (2012). The ISTSS Expert Consensus Treatment Guidelines for Complex PTSD in Adults. Retrieved November 2023 from: https://istss.org/ISTSS_Main/media/Documents/ISTSS-Expert-Concesnsus-Guidelines-for-Complex-PTSD-Updated-060315.pdf

Ferenczi, S. (1931). Child-analysis in the analysis of adults. International Journal of Psycho-analysis¸ 12, 468-482.

Ferenczi, S. (1949). Confusion of the tongues between the adults and the child – The language of tenderness and of passion. International Journal of Psycho-analysis¸ 30, 225-230. An online version (published in 1988) can be found here.

Fisher, J. (2017). Twenty-five years of trauma treatment: What have we learned? Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 11(3), 273-289.

Frankel, J. (2002). Exploring Ferenczi’s concept of identification with the aggressor: Its role in trauma, everyday life, and the therapeutic relationship. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(1), 101-139.

Frankel, J. (2004). Identification with the aggressor and the “normal traumas”: Clinical implications. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 13(1-2), 78-83.

Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through. Standard Edition.

Gurevich, H. (2015). The language of absence and the language of tenderness: Therapeutic transformation of early psychic trauma and dissociation as resolution of the “identification with the aggressor.” Fort Da, 21(1), 45-65.

Howell, E.F. (2014). Ferenczi’s concept of identification with the aggressor: Understanding dissociative structure with interacting victim and abuser self-states. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74(1), 48-59.

Norcross, J. C., & Lambert, M. J. (2018). Psychotherapy relationships that work III. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 303–315.

Ogden, T. H. (1983). The concept of internal object relations. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. 64, 227-241.

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