Anna Freud: Identification with the Aggressor

What should we do when we feel angry? Should we act it out by hitting a pillow? Distract ourselves? Repress it?

This has been a big question in parenting, in psychotherapy, and even in pop culture.
You may have heard of this study where people were encouraged to punch a punching bag while thinking of someone who made them angry.

Did it help?

No. It actually made people more aggressive.

Researchers concluded:

“For reducing anger, the worst advice is to tell people to imagine their provocateur’s face on a punching bag… yet that’s exactly what many pop psychologists suggest.”
(Source: Bushman et al., 2002)

We will come back to this study later but a question we can ask is: Why does acting out the anger not help (or not help in this instance)? And is there maybe more nuance to this?

To answer this question, I would like to call upon the help and genius of Anna Freud and her concept of the Identification with the Aggressor.

Who Was Anna Freud?

Anna Freud was Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter and an innovative and influential psychoanalyst in her own right. (Talk about stepping out of the shadow of a famous parental figure.)

Their relationship was very close. She was analyzed by her father (something that would be unthinkable today) and in her own work she focused on the psychoanalysis of children and studying the ego’s defense mechanisms. Which made her one of the most important contributors to the school of ego psychology.

Freud had developed the structural model of the psyche with the Id, Ego, and Super-Ego. And he was much more pre-occupied with the conflict between the Id and Super-Ego (or wishes/desires and moral/societal demands).

Ego psychology looks much more at the ego. What are the abilities of the ego? How does the ego deal with reality? Which is much more about understanding developmental deficits, rather than inner conflicts (between the Id and Super-Ego).

In her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense from 1936 she laid out many of the ways the ego protects itself from internal and external threats.

One of her most famous contributions is: Identification with the Aggressor. It’s a short and sweet chapter of only 12 pages, so if you want to read it yourself, it’s more accessible than you might think.

Identification With the Aggressor

First of all, Identification with the Aggressor is a defense mechanism.

We use defense mechanisms to reduce anxiety (or other unpleasurable experiences), which is a very important function.

Leon Wurmser a Swiss psychoanalyst described defense mechanisms in his book The Mask of Shame as “different ways of saying no to the truth”. Which highlights the downside of defenses: We distort reality.

Identification is a very complex defense mechanism, that can be used to defend both against threats from the outside as well as threats from within.

When it comes to threats from within (which might be impulses, wishes, memories, anything we deem dangerous) identification is used to build up the Super-Ego. We identify with our parents and change ourselves in their image. Identification then means “I am just as kind, powerful, intelligent, ambitious, altruistic… as you are – and therefore, I don’t steal, I don’t hit my sibling, I don’t cheat on my partner (even though I really want to).”

Identification is used to build up the Super-Ego and therefore defends against libidinal drives. And before that it’s also one of the most important ways to deal with frightening people in reality.

Anna Freud observed that the children she had in analysis, who were afraid of someone, transformed that fear into safety and control by identifying with the aggressor.
“I am just as scary, aggressive, masculine, powerful… as you”

This could take different forms:

(1) They imitate facial expressions or mannerisms of the aggressor.

(2) They identify with the aggression, meaning they only acted out the aggression without depicting the aggressor as such.

(3) They identify with the masculinity and come to the session all dressed up as military men.

Either way, what happened was that those kids turned passivity into activity. They turned themselves from a victim into the perpetrator.

“Prophylactic” Aggression

The defends of identifying with the aggressor is not just a response to immediate criticism or aggression, it is also used prophylactically.

If a little boy comes home late from playing outside, rings the bell aggressively, and complains why the mother opens the door so late as soon as she opens. The little boy has not been scolded for being late but he anticipates punishment. And then “Aggression is the best defense”.

Or imagine a patient complaints angrily to analyst about her perceived “secretiveness”, which is neutrality, “You never have an opinion, you don’t even tell me where you go on vacation”, big outburst – but really it is the patient who has been keeping secrets and is afraid of being punished by the analyst.

This prophylactic aggression always correlates with amount of anxiety and turns the feared criticism against the person one is afraid will punish oneself. Turning passivity in activity.

Helpful and Unhelpful Aspects

Identification with the aggressor is a normal defense against dealing with anxiety-inducing others. It can also be a normal transitional stage in the development of morals and the super-ego. Where we gradually internalising criticism from the outside, attributes of our parents/educators, taking over their values. Full super-ego development would mean to turn criticism into self-criticism. Which also means dealing with guilt.

It becomes unhelpful (1) if it doesn’t allow for the normal development of the super-ego, (2) if it leads to intolerance toward others (while being too lenient with the self), (3) if it means that any inkling of guilt leads to lashing out against others, and (4) if it enters into loving relations: If in a relationship one partner is attacking another for presumably being unfaithful, when really there is no basis for it and most likely the partner who is attacking is the one who was unfaithful or is thinking about it themselves.

It is especially important for transference in psychotherapy to distinguish between anxiety and aggression: If psychotherapy unearths real aggressive impulses, aggression demands expression in acting out – and that helps. But where aggression defends against anxiety (as is the case of the identification with the aggressor), acting out aggression does nothing – instead it actually intensifies it until the source of anxiety and the fear of guilt and punishment is understood and lessened.

Back to the Study

Going back to the study, we need to take a closer look at the setup of the experiment to understand what might be going on here:

“Participants were tested individually, but each was led to believe that he or she would be interacting with another participant of the same sex. They were told that the researchers were studying first impressions. After giving informed consent, each participant wrote a one-paragraph essay on abortion, either pro-choice or pro-life (whichever the participant supported). After finishing, the participant’s essay was taken away to be shown to the other participant (who was in fact nonexistent) for evaluation. Meanwhile, the participant was permitted to evaluate the partner’s essay, which expressed the opposite view on abortion (e.g., if the participant’s essay was pro-choice, the partner’s essay was pro-life). A short time later, the experimenter brought the participant’s own essay back with comments ostensibly made by the other participant. All participants received bad evaluations consisting of negative ratings on organization, originality, writing style, clarity of expression, persuasiveness of arguments, and overall quality. (…) There was also a handwritten comment stating “This is one of the worst essays I have read!” Previous research has shown that this procedure makes people quite angry.”

If you read this, would you say it’s fair to say that this procedure makes people angry? If you imagine the participants punching the punching bag, are they processing their own aggression?

I would say no. They were told they studied first impressions, I would imagine that there was also a lot of anxiety around rejection and shame elicited there. And, therefore, when the participants punched the punching bag, they were identified with the aggressor to lessen their anxiety – which is why acting out aggression did not help.

What would have been helpful would be to understand and explore the underlying anxiety of being rejected and shamed, which is exactly what Anna Freud and her concept of the identification with the aggressor helps us realize.