Identification With the Aggressor and Complex Trauma

When living through chronic, ongoing trauma during childhood, our mind will do whatever it takes to survive. When those traumatic experiences, whether marked by abuse or neglect, take place in the relationships with adults 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.

Our experiences of complex relational trauma become 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. 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, and longings. We learn that by prioritizing others, we stand 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 to feel safe. However, this idea is not new. This kind of process has been recognized by psychoanalysis for decades through the concept of "identification with the aggressor," as introduced by Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in 1932 through 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.

What Is Identification With the Aggressor?

A common use of this term refers to the ways in which, often unconsciously, people might “identify” with their aggressors through mimicry. For example, a child victim of verbal abuse who becomes verbally abusive toward 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). As psychoanalyst Jay Frankel (2002) puts it, “we stop being ourselves and transform ourselves into someone else’s image of us.” 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 us make sense of the experience, or when the abuse is denied, minimized, or invalidated. The child will develop an acute sensibility to other people’s moods, anticipate other’s demands and expectations, and accommodate their own self to what they consciously or unconsciously perceive that the aggressor requires from them.

"Identifying" with the adults around us is not necessarily a bad thing and, in fact, can be very important in the development of our personality and sense of self. However, psychoanalyst and trauma expert Elizabeth Howell (2014) notes that Ferenczi does not talk about healthy identification that supports the child’s developing 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.

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.

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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.” 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.” The absence of recognition, holding, and containment of the child’s traumatic experience is, by itself, annihilating (Gurevich, 2015).

In the next part of this series, I will discuss the impact of identification with the aggressor during childhood in our adulthood, including ways in which it becomes part of who we are and infiltrates our relationships.