"The eye is an organ which will devour but not disgorge."
(Anne Friedberg)

Freud defines the first moments of identification in terms of a soon-to-be heterosexual boy who "will exhibit a special interest in his father...[the boy] would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere" (105). Simultaneously, the boy develops an "object-cathexis" towards his mother. All proceeds smoothly until the boy wants to take the place of his father in order to love his mother as a sexual object, and then identification "can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone's removal" (105). Freud compares identification to cannibalism : "The object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such...[the cannibal] has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond" (105). This ambivalence at the heart of identification is central to feminist film theories of the "gaze" and spectatorship which indicate that identification is not a neutral stage in a childhood process, but often a debilitating aspect of subjectivity.