Between identification and thinking: some notes on internalization Using clinical material, an identificatory process is described, in which analytical listening articulates the intra-psychic and drive-related to what is historical and intersubjective. It is postulated that this process attacks the subject’s capacity to think, condemning him to repeat compulsively a past that could never be. The author thinks that, even though identification is inevitable from the diachronicdevelopmental point of view, because it facilitates subjective structuring, it is only a moment of transit, not of arrival, since it contains the possibility of heteronomy.