Identification with the aggressor
Usually treated as a neurotic-level defence (not ranked by Vaillant); McWilliams discusses it under identification, a secondary defence. A person who has been frightened or hurt takes on the attitudes or behaviour of the one who hurt them, either treating others the same way or reading and complying with the aggressor's wishes.
What drives it
Turns helplessness into power (I become the one who does it) or buys safety by merging with the threat's point of view. Ferenczi stressed the compliant form, in which the victim anticipates and fulfils the abuser's wishes; Anna Freud stressed the active form.
How it shows
Work
The manager hazed early in their career who now runs a brutal culture and calls it “building resilience”. Juniors who take on a bullying boss's contempt for colleagues. Staff who defend an abusive leader to outsiders. The aggressor's phrases echo: “That's just how it's done here.”
Relationships
A parent repeating their own parent's harshness, sometimes word for word. A bullied child who bullies a sibling. An abused partner who takes the abuser's side against family who try to help.
Self
You hear your parent's or old boss's voice coming out of your mouth, in the tone you hated. Or you sense instantly what a powerful, angry person wants and give it before they ask.
What tells it apart
Trauma bonding: Trauma bonding is attachment to an abuser through alternating cruelty and warmth; identification takes on the abuser's attitudes or actions, and can continue long after contact ends.
Fawn response: Fawning is appeasement in the moment; identification with the aggressor goes further, adopting the aggressor's values or treating others as one was treated.
Introjection: Introjection takes in a figure's voice as an inner critic aimed at oneself; identification with the aggressor typically aims the aggression outward or merges with the aggressor's view.
A test
Compare how they treat people below them with how they were treated at the same stage; a near-copy, defended as necessary, confirms it.
Questions to carry
- Compared with how they were treated at that same stage, how do they treat the people below them now?
- Whose harshness toward me have I caught coming out of my own mouth?
How strong the research is
clinical. Clinically established and consistent with research on intergenerational cycles of abuse, which also shows most victims do not repeat the pattern.
Where it comes from
Sándor Ferenczi, 1932 (published 1933); Anna Freud, 1936
Sources
- Sándor Ferenczi, Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child (1933)
- Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936)