Identity and Identification

How the People You Internalized Became the Leader You Are

Mar 28, 2026

Identity and Identification

Understanding yourself and changing yourself are different things. When you undertake serious development work, this dynamic is most often discovered early in the process and causes confusion. Insight accumulates. Patterns get named. Self-awareness deepens. And yet, under pressure, the same behavior returns. The same reaction. The same version of themselves they were trying to move past.

Something holds it in place. That something has a name.

This article explores the difference in identity and identification so that you can overcome this hurdle. Identity is the story a person carries about who they are: the values claimed, the qualities recognized, the account of how they became themselves. Identification is the process that built the story. It operates below the threshold of choice and runs earlier than memory. Most development frameworks work at the level of identity. The material that actually organizes behavior sits one layer deeper, in the identifications formed long before the person could examine them.

This matters for anyone who works with people in transition, coaches leaders, or has found themselves unable to act on something they understood with complete clarity. What this piece offers is a way to see the structure beneath that gap.

Identity is the narrative.

It is how you explain yourself to yourself. The values you claim, the qualities you recognize, the story that links who you were to who you are becoming. Identity is a structure, and like any structure it holds things in place. It gives a person shape in the world.

Identity emerges as a collective from all of our experiences that little by little build over time. This includes the desirable and the undesirable alike.

Identification is the process that builds the structure.

Freud was the first to name it precisely.

“Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person.” (Freud, 1921, p. 60)

It is what the psyche does in the presence of a significant other or a significant event: it takes something in, makes it part of itself.

“Identification endeavours to mould a person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as a model.” (Freud, 1921, p. 63)

The father, the teacher, the first supervisor. The mentor who believed you were capable. The one who did not.

These internalized figures become permanent residents. They shape the internal judge who decides whether you belong in the room, whether you have the right to hold authority, whether this role is yours to occupy.

Why the distinction changes the work.

A senior leader who knows they need to delegate more but cannot release control is struggling, but not because of poor planning or insufficient trust. They are carrying an older script about competence. One that says real leaders stay close to the work, that stepping back means stepping out. That script did not come from a management course. It came from someone, internalized before the person knew what internalization was.

A manager who values openness but becomes closed under pressure might seem hypocritical and yet they are being genuine. They are discovering that stated values and identification-level material are not the same thing. When a room heats up, the older structure takes over. Values that live at the level of identity cannot compete with identifications that live below the threshold of intention.

Rather than failures of character, these are failures of a different order entirely: the gap between what a person consciously holds and what was built into them before consciousness had a say.

This is why behavior in organizations is so difficult to shift with information alone. You can know something completely and still not be able to act on it. The knowing is happening at one level. The block is happening at another.

How it shows up.

“The relation to early figures keeps reappearing and problems that remain unresolved in infancy or early childhood are revived though in modified form. For example, the attitude towards a subordinate or a superior repeats up to a point the relation to a younger sibling or to a parent.” (Klein, 1959, p. 257)

Klein is describing the workplace before the word workplace existed. The manager who cannot give critical feedback without becoming punitive is replaying something much older (in addition to enacting in the moment a poor management style). The team member who shuts down in the presence of a strong authority figure does not mean to be difficult with present colleagues under present conditions. They are in a room that, unconsciously, they have been in before.

A leader who cannot hold authority without performing certainty, because in their formative history uncertainty was met with contempt. A manager who responds to a direct report the way a critical parent once responded to them, pulled by something in the relational dynamic that triggers an older script. A team that recreates the hierarchy of a leader’s family of origin without anyone choosing it.

Freud described the mechanism that drives this repetition. What a patient cannot remember, they repeat. The memory feels entirely present, entirely about the current situation even though its time is well past.

“This new fact, which we thus recognize so unwillingly, is known by us as transference. We mean a transference of feelings on to the person of the doctor, since we do not believe that the situation in the treatment could justify the development of such feelings. We suspect, on the contrary, that the whole readiness for these feelings is derived from elsewhere, that they were already prepared in the patient and, upon the opportunity offered by the analytic treatment, are transferred on to the person of the doctor.” (Freud, 1917, p. 494)

The language is clinical. The phenomenon is organizational. The colleague who provokes a reaction that belongs to another room. The meeting that floods you with intensity that has no obvious source in the present. The leader who triggers in their team something that has little to do with what the leader actually did.

Identifications travel through time. The workplace is where they surface.

What to do with this.

The work is not to eliminate identifications. They cannot be eliminated. They are the raw material of personhood. The work is to develop enough reflective distance to recognize when you are inside one.

This is what supervision, coaching, and sustained reflective practice make possible. What they make possible is the capacity to pause long enough to ask: is this response mine, or is it an echo? Does this reaction belong to this situation, or to an older one?

When that question becomes available, something shifts. The identification will never dissolve entirely. But it will lose its automatic quality when held to account in the moment. A person can begin to choose if they put in the work to be aware.

Klein’s conclusion about the adult world is worth holding:

“nothing that ever existed in the unconscious completely loses its influence on the personality.” (Klein, 1959, p. 262)

The aim is recognition. And recognition, in this work, is already a form of freedom.

That is what the distinction between identity and identification makes possible: a different relationship to the story you have been living without knowing it

If what you have read here struck a chord, there are a few ways we could take this conversation further:

Talks and Offsites – If you are shaping a leadership retreat or planning a gathering where you want people to think differently about themselves and the systems they inhabit, I can help spark that dialogue.

Executive Coaching – For leaders navigating complexity, change, or the unspoken dynamics in their roles, I offer one-to-one coaching as a thinking partner in the work.

You can reach me directly if one of these feels like the right next step.

Reflection

These questions are designed to help you work with the distinction between identity and identification in your own practice and organizational life.

Identity and the Stories We Carry

What story do you carry about who you are as a leader, and where did that story begin?

Which parts of your identity feel most stable under pressure, and which become uncertain or shift?

What values do you claim that you have not yet fully lived into?

Identification and the Invisible Structure

Who are the figures, past or present, whose ways of being you have internalized most deeply?

What patterns do you notice in yourself under pressure that you cannot fully account for?

Where do you notice that your reaction to a current situation carries an intensity that belongs somewhere older?

Patterns in Organizational Life

When recurring dynamics surface in your team, who or what might those dynamics be replaying?

Where in your organization do reactions seem larger than the present situation warrants?

How does the hierarchy in your organization feel emotionally, and whose earlier hierarchy does it resemble?

Developing Reflective Practice

What structures do you have in place that help you pause and ask: is this response mine, or is it an echo?

How do you make space for others to examine their identifications rather than act from them automatically?

What would it mean to lead from a place that is slightly larger than your history?

Charles LaBelle

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