The term identification fantasies originally referred to imaginary constructions or even genuine unconscious fantasmatic scenarios through which the subject replaces a part of their Ego or Superego with a primordial figure from their family history, particularly the father, mother, or grandparents, such that this figure lives a small or large fragment of the individual's own existence as a substitute.

Only an interpretation that is integrated into an ongoing analytic process, where the psychoanalyst's own identification fantasies are also activated, makes it possible to detect these fantasies and understand their meaning as expressed through symptoms, behaviors, or even delusions, in the sense that Sigmund Freud spoke of delusions in the case of the Rat Man (1909d).

Used similarly by Alain de Mijolla in "La désertion du capitaine Rimbaud" ("Captain Rimbaud's desertion"; 1975/1981), the notion of...