Anna Freud, exploring the aggressive attraction, came to the conclusion that libido and aggression have the same source - the unconscious of a person, and also develop according to the same laws. The stages of development of an aggressive drive are the same as in the development of a libid drive, and have similar protective mechanisms, as are closely related. But aggressive attraction has some peculiar protective mechanisms: delegation and identification with the aggressor.
On the example of working with children, Anna Freud considers several options for the formation of psychological defense - identification with the aggressor:
1) The child can identify with the aggressive behavior of the person whom he fears. In this case, identification is an assimilation of another person through his facial expressions, actions, portrayal of emotions. So, a child who, according to the teacher, “made faces” during the lessons, just repeated his facial expressions, which became noticeable to the psychoanalyst from the outside.
2) To overcome fear, children can independently invent ways to protect themselves from it, repeating the illusory actions of a possible aggressor. The girl, who was afraid of ghosts, which in her opinion were in a dark corridor, passed through this space to overcome this space, waving her arms strongly, as a ghost might do. In such situations, identification is a change of roles, when the child stands in the position of an awesome object and becomes an aggressor himself.
3) Often children are identified not with an external object, but with the strength of its aggression. Having encountered the fist of a physical education teacher, the student came to school the next day with different types of weapons, i.e. made an attempt to join his power, strength, masculinity. Actually, the teacher did not show aggression, did not seek to punish the child, and the baby showed not so much aggression as methods of protection against all possible aggressive actions of strong men. In such situations, identification is a manifestation of the emerging Super-Self of a child when the student does not show aggression, but finds a way to prevent it in the future as a way of protection. In addition to acquiring weapons, such a child can begin to engage in sports, strengthening his muscular strength.
4) In active games, children often portray aggressors, training their attraction, although no aggressive actions by adults or peers were committed against them. In an aggressive game, identification is a kind of training of aggressive attraction, when the internal aggressor can take the form of a warrior, monster or terminator.
Identification with the aggressor is a normal process of regulating one’s attraction, which can be trained with the help of fantasies, games, and sports. In an antisocial environment, children use their aggression to identify with a group of other aggressors in order to be “their” in such a group, part of a common aggressive force. Identification in the family occurs in a child with significant people, with their character qualities, i.e. personal identification is the process of a child’s development, familiarization with other people, regardless of whether they are involved in identification: aggressive or libidinal.
The strength of aggressive attraction increases, while it is forbidden, while the child does not know how to control it, is not familiar with its strength and power. An aggressive criminal can be a child who was strictly forbidden to show aggression, or one who showed it uncontrollably and constantly. Forensic identification, i.e. identifying the offender by fingerprints, voice, or other signs in the aggregate only stops him, but does not help solve the problem of his aggression. Psychological and pedagogical work with the internal aggressor, who is constantly “eager” to prove himself, must be carried out from early childhood, training the attraction, controlling it and controlling it.