Freud treats the state as an emotional unity.[84] The members of the state identify themselves with an abstract object (the idea of the state) and are bound emotionally by the partial identification which arises in perceiving an analogous relationship to the object. Kelsen has objected to this conception of the state as a real subjective unity by arguing that identification is a process between individuals, and that each member of a state cannot be thought of as having entered into personal relationships with every other member. Even if his narrow construction of identification were well founded, the state could still be treated as a real subjective unity on the basis of interlocking identifications. A has identified with B and B with C, and one of the features of B which the child A would typically take over (introject) would be the name and other symbols of the state. Indeed, it is the interlocking character of identifications which reasonably insures the incorporation of the state symbol into the child’s conception of himself. There is such a process as negative identification, the rejection of patterns which are connected with hated persons. The child is usually exposed to many adults and contemporaries, and if they all associate themselves with the state, the child is almost certain to reject only those patterns which pertain exclusively to the hated individuals. This is the fundamental reason for the staying power of patterns once accepted in a group. It has been customary in the psychoanalytical literature on social and political processes to describe the state as a universal father-substitute. We are at length in a position to discuss the problems raised by such a generalization. The distinctive contribution of the psychopathological approach is the plurality of individual meanings which it discloses. It is an anticlimax to discover that the appearance of diversity is, after all, spurious, and that those who insist upon the strenuous simplification of human motives are justified. The point which I wish to insist upon is that the data revealed by the psychopathological procedure are far more significant for political and social science than this single-track generalization would lead one to suppose.