For identification you need an object in a narrative, that is, an object in time, an object whose fortune or fate is as yet undetermined, in other words, an object you can care about because it exists contingently in a world. The world may be no more than time and the contingency only its own uncertain development, or it may be a fully unfolded and believed in story-world - but don't such worlds typically open with the words, 'Once upon a time', or 'Il était une fois'? You care for its contingency, as if there were a lack which you could address if not redress. Your care is a kind of empathy in that you feel the feelings appropriate to the condition of your object, not as if it could see itself from your point of view, but as if its mother could, if it had a mother. But identification goes further, because up to now you the observer are quite distinct from what was being observed, even as you are filled with feeling. What ensues is an irresistible melting of the boundary, an extraordinary, but all too ordinary Schwärmerei. A moment's surrender and you are swallowed up. This describes what it is to identify with a character or with a cause, but surely the same thing occurs when you identify with yourself, with your self. Only then it is more abstract, more intimate, and made more irresistible by a cascade, or indeed a swarm, of prior identifications.