Honoring Fred Pine: A Study Evaluating the Role of Identification in Two Sisters Over 60 Years

Abstract

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to focus on the role of identification processes, how they change and transform over the course of 60 years, to highlight the depth and complexity that has been added to our psychoanalytic endeavor through the far-reaching developmental perspective of Fred Pine. My goal has been to fill in some of the gaps in the evolution of complex, coherent, integrated mental representations of self and other and the evolving quality of intimacy. By tracing the developmental trajectories of two sisters over 60 years, one – the oldest daughter – rejected and neglected for being a girl and, the younger daughter – the child whom the mother “always wanted.” I will show how supercharged affective moments of disrupted merger played out differently in each sister because each identified with a different aspect of mother. Some differences include a focus on transforming and evolving identifications as the subjects faced the challenges of the different developmental periods, not only during earliest childhood but including latency, emerging adulthood, midlife, and late middle age. Also highlighted is the role of different ways of coping with early aggression – those that interfere, causing rigidity. and those that facilitate flexibility in evolving mental representations.