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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Identification
• magnification
• internalization
• longitudinal developmental pathways

Acknowledgement

I appreciate the opportunity to Direct the Follow-up study of Mahler’s original subjects that the Margaret S Mahler Child Development Foundation has provided me and their support of this research. Thanks to Miriam Steele for her incredibly important thoughts that contributed to the final version of this paper and for scoring the AAI for attachment and RF; to Diana Diamond for her useful comments on previous drafts of the paper and for scoring the Object Representation Inventory (ORI) with the D-RS; to Bill Singletary for his unwavering support as President of the Margaret S. Mahler Child Development Foundation; to Inga Blom for sharing generously her dissertation research and comments on this work; to Julia Sowislo for administering and scoring the STIPO; to Anthony Boirdo for administering and scoring the Mirror Interview.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wendy Olesker

Wendy Olesker, PhD, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and on the Faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She is Senior Editor of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. She is Director of the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. For the past ten years she has been Director of the Follow-up Study of the Margaret Mahler Foundation.