The Borrowed Self

When ordinary belonging is out of reach, the social brain reaches toward what appears to have it.

The Thing the Brain Will Not Negotiate On

There is a need so fundamental that the infant brain cannot survive without it, and that the adult brain — whatever strategies experience has taught it to develop — never fully stops reaching for. The neuroscience of social exclusion shows that the same neural circuits activated by physical pain are activated by social rejection: the anterior cingulate cortex, the insula, the regions the brain uses to register that something has gone wrong in the body (Eisenberger, Lieberman, and Williams, 2003). The brain does not distinguish, at this level of processing, between a blow and a snub. Both register as harm. Some adults learn, through experience, to organise their lives around the appearance of not needing connection — but the appearance is a strategy, not an absence. The need does not go away. It goes underground.

The need in question is belonging. Not mere proximity to other people — the experience of being genuinely included, of being known and wanted by others, of occupying a recognised place in a social world that would notice one’s absence. Robin Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis, which tracks the relationship between neocortex volume and social group size across primate species, proposes that the human brain expanded primarily to manage the cognitive demands of social relationships (Dunbar, 1992; 1998). The brain was not built first for reasoning and only secondarily for relationships. It was built for relationships — and the reasoning came with it. The social need is not an add-on to human nature. It is, in the most precise sense available, what human nature is.

This matters for what follows, because it establishes the stakes. When a person’s ordinary routes to belonging are blocked — whether by temperament, by circumstance, by the timing of a transition, by an attachment history that made social trust difficult, or simply by a mismatch between who they are and the social world available to them — the brain does not accept the deficit. It reaches. And one of the most consistent, most human, and most frequently misunderstood ways it reaches is toward another person — or figure, or character, or icon — who appears to have what is most urgently wanted.

This essay is about that reaching. About the way the need to belong, when it cannot be met directly, turns toward another person’s identity as a resource — borrowing what cannot yet be built, reaching toward what cannot yet be found.

The reaching runs along a spectrum. At one end sits something entirely ordinary and developmentally healthy: interest in, and admiration for, someone who seems to embody what the social brain is reaching toward. At the other end sits something that warrants genuine attention: the gradual replacement of one’s own identity with a borrowed one — an assimilation of self into other that, by the time it is complete, has left very little of the original behind. Between those two ends are fandom and obsession — stages that are neither simply healthy nor simply harmful, but which carry their own distinct signatures and their own risks.

The argument of this essay is not that this spectrum represents a hierarchy from normal to pathological. It is that all four points on the spectrum — interest, fandom, obsession, assimilation — are expressions of the same underlying need. The need does not change. What changes is how far the brain has had to travel to manage it, and what the self has had to sacrifice along the way.

Before the Psychology: How the Modern World Learned to Manufacture Aspiration

The ego ideal mechanism — the social brain’s reaching toward a figure who appears to have what the self most urgently wants — is genuinely ancient. Aristotle wrote about zelos, the admiration of another’s qualities as distinct from envy, and its role in moral development. The veneration of saints in medieval Christianity, the hero worship of warriors and craftsmen in pre-literate societies, the admiration projected onto a skilled elder within a small community — these are all expressions of the same forward-reaching function. In that sense, the mechanism predates recorded history.

But the specific phenomenon this essay describes — the sustained, identity-organising fixation on a distant figure who does not know the admirer exists, running from fandom through to assimilation — is not ancient at all. It requires conditions that simply did not exist before the modern period. And understanding what those conditions are, how they were created, and how they have been progressively intensified across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is necessary context for understanding why the spectrum from interest to assimilation has become so visible, and so consequential, now.

The first condition is distance combined with apparent intimacy. In pre-modern life, the admired figure was almost always someone within the admirer’s actual social world — a local lord, a priest, a master craftsman, an older relative. The ego ideal was typically projected onto people with whom genuine relationship was possible, even if asymmetrical. The admiration was real; so was the person. A 17th century European citizen might revere a monarch or a saint, but the relationship was mediated through institution and ritual, not through the felt sense of personal knowledge. There was no mechanism for projecting intense personal identification onto someone you had never encountered, never would encounter, and yet felt you somehow knew.

The second condition is identity anxiety — the felt need to construct a self from available materials rather than receive one from a fixed social structure. Pre-modern identity was largely assigned: by class, by guild, by religion, by family, by geography. You knew who you were because the social structure told you, usually at birth and with very limited scope for revision. The anxious identity-seeking that makes the borrowed self so tempting is a distinctly modern problem, accelerating through the Enlightenment’s individualisation of the self, through the industrial revolution’s dismantling of fixed occupational and community structures, and arriving — in its current acute form — in the late twentieth century’s explosion of individual choice. Charles Taylor’s account of the modern self as an ongoing project of self-construction (Sources of the Self, 1989) identifies precisely this shift: the modern person must author their own identity in a way that earlier periods simply did not require, and that authorship is experienced as both freedom and burden.

The First Modern Eruption: Liszt and the Body’s Response

Before Hollywood, before the consumer economy, before any of the infrastructure that now sustains mass parasocial identification, there was a moment in 1840s Europe that showed what the mechanism could do under the right conditions — and it was not the brain alone that expressed it.

When Franz Liszt toured Europe in the 1840s, the response of his audiences was documented in terms that contemporaries found medically alarming. Women fainted, wept uncontrollably, fought over his discarded gloves and broken piano strings, collected his cigar stubs as relics. Heinrich Heine, observing the phenomenon in 1844, named it Lisztomania — and noted its resemblance to epidemic hysteria more than to ordinary aesthetic appreciation. This was not enthusiasm for music. It was a collective psychological and somatic event, and it preceded Hollywood by eight decades.

The clinical reading of 19th century hysteria — running from Charcot’s work at the Salpêtrière through Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) — proposed that hysterical symptoms were the body’s expression of affect that the social environment had provided no legitimate outlet for. For most of the women in Liszt’s audiences, access to public life, professional identity, sanctioned ambition, or any form of intense, visible self-expression was severely constrained or simply unavailable. The ego ideal — the forward-reaching image of what one might become — had nowhere legitimate to go. Liszt, embodying a kind of artistic freedom, social power, and expressive intensity entirely unavailable to his female audience, became the vessel for everything the social structure would not allow them to want for themselves.

What Lisztomania revealed — and what Beatlemania would confirm a century later, with the same demographic profile and the same somatic intensity — is that the mechanism does not require industrial manufacture. It requires a charismatic figure and a population with a sufficiently wide belonging gap and sufficiently blocked ordinary routes to identity expression. The young women screaming at Beatles concerts in the early 1960s were, as Barbara Ehrenreich and colleagues argued in their influential 1992 analysis, doing something that was not primarily about the Beatles at all. The four men on the stage were a permission structure — an occasion for a public assertion of the right to feel intensely, visibly, and loudly, in a social moment when female self-expression was still severely constrained. The hysteria was the belonging gap finding a body.

This matters for the essay’s argument because it means the spectrum from fandom to assimilation is not a product of the consumer economy. The consumer economy didn’t create the mechanism. It identified it, understood its commercial potential, and built an infrastructure to exploit it at industrial scale.

Hollywood and the Demigod Model

The studio system of the 1920s and 1930s was the first institution to do this deliberately and systematically. The major studios — MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Fox — did not merely manufacture films. They manufactured stars, and in doing so created the first industrial-scale apparatus for directing the ego ideal toward a curated, commercially managed identity.

Studio moguls like Louis B. Mayer understood that what audiences were responding to was not simply performance. It was presence — the animating force that passed from a specific human being through the screen and into the watching body. Their achievement was to concentrate that force in a small number of carefully selected and professionally constructed figures, and then build a complete commercial ecology around it: fan magazines, studio portraits, managed personal narratives, the controlled release of carefully calibrated personal information designed to sustain fascination without ever satisfying it. Clark Gable’s effortless masculine authority. Greta Garbo’s untouchable self-possession. The studio system took ordinary people — many of them from working-class or immigrant backgrounds — and transformed them, through training, grooming, costuming, and narrative management, into living projections of the ego ideal. Not who audiences were, but who they wanted to be.

The crucial feature of this model is that it depended entirely on maintained distance. The demigod had to remain unreachable. The aspiration the star generated was commercially productive precisely because it could not be fully satisfied. A star who became too ordinary, too accessible, too human in their public presentation, ceased to function as a vehicle for ego ideal projection. The distance was not incidental to the commercial model. It was the commercial model.

The American Innovation: Selling Products Through the Gap

What American advertising understood, and systematised from the 1920s onward, was that the ego ideal projection the demigod star carried could be made to do commercial work well beyond the box office. This was not a new insight in principle — the endorsement of products by admired figures is ancient — but its application at mass scale, across domestic consumer categories, represented something qualitatively new.

Edward Bernays, working from an explicitly psychoanalytic understanding of consumer motivation, articulated the method with startling directness in Propaganda (1928). The public, he argued, could be moved not by rational argument but by connecting products to the unconscious desires and aspirations that organised their behaviour. The mechanism is precisely what this essay describes: identify what the social brain is reaching toward; find a figure who appears to embody it; attach the product to that figure; allow the aspiration to perform the commercial work. What is being sold is not the product. It is proximity to the aspiration.

The application of this method to domestic goods is documented across the advertising history of the period. Roland Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream (1985) shows how American advertising in the 1920s and 1930s shifted systematically across product categories — from hygiene to household appliances to food — from selling utility to selling aspiration. The vacuum cleaner and the washing machine, marketed from the 1910s onward, were among the first domestic products to be sold through social tableau imagery: the modern home, the liberated housewife, the class-coded vision of a life one degree better than the one currently inhabited. By the 1930s the electric refrigerator had become, of all domestic objects, perhaps the most symbolically charged vehicle for this aspiration — not because it came first in the marketing sequence, but because it sat at the centre of the kitchen, the most aspirationally loaded domestic space in the mid-century American imagination. Hollywood-style film shorts were used by manufacturers to dramatise modern kitchen scenes, placing appliances within a visual language drawn directly from the studio system. The product borrowed the glamour of the world the star inhabited. The consumer purchased a fragment of both.

The structural logic is precise: the celebrity’s elevation needs to be maintained above the consumer for the aspiration to function. The consumer typically cannot reach the star. But they can reach the product the star is associated with. The product becomes the bridge across a gap that is rarely, and commercially must not be, fully closed. The gap is the engine of the commercial relationship.

The Inversion: When Celebrities Need the Brand

The late twentieth century introduced a structural reversal of this logic that is still accelerating.

The demigod model required the celebrity’s status to be independent of any specific product association. Chanel needed Marilyn Monroe more than Monroe needed Chanel — the celebrity’s elevation was intrinsic, and the endorsement borrowed from it without diminishing it. The product gained lustre from the association; the star lost nothing.

What emerged in the latter decades of the twentieth century, and has become the dominant model in the twenty-first, is something structurally opposite. The minor celebrity — the B and C-list figure — does not possess independent elevation sufficient to sustain the demigod model. Their status is not intrinsic. It is constituted by their brand associations. The appearance at Cannes in the right dress. The Apple phone visible in the Instagram story at a carefully composed angle. The Gucci bag photographed at an airport, tagged and geolocated. The backstage pass to the right event, the table at the right restaurant, the proximity to the right people. These are not endorsements in the classical sense. They are identity signals, and they work simultaneously in both directions: the brand lends the celebrity legitimacy; the celebrity lends the brand visibility. Neither party is straightforwardly elevated. Both are performing aspiration for an audience that is itself performing aspiration in response.

The result is an aspiration cascade — a continuous chain of upward social comparison in which almost everyone is simultaneously admiring someone above them on the ladder and being observed by someone below, and in which brands circulate through the entire chain as the currency of status. Thorstein Veblen’s analysis of conspicuous consumption (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899) identified the underlying mechanism long before its current expression: goods acquire value not from their utility but from their capacity to signal social standing to an audience capable of reading the signal. What the aspiration cascade does is make Veblen’s leisure class a continuous, algorithmically optimised structure in which almost every level is simultaneously consuming and being consumed, aspiring and being aspired to.

The Current Moment: Performed Transparency

The digital era has added a further turn. The influencer economy has made the celebrity-brand relationship so visible that its visibility has itself become content. The #ad disclosure, the gifted label, the behind-the-scenes brand trip presented as unfiltered access — these perform transparency while remaining as managed as anything the Hollywood publicity departments produced. And the audience knows this, and watches regardless, and purchases regardless, because the belonging that participation in the aspiration cascade provides is real even when its mechanisms are entirely visible.

The Cambridge Dictionary’s naming of “parasocial” as its word of the year for 2025 marks the point at which the cultural mainstream caught up with what the research had been documenting since Horton and Wohl coined the term in 1956. What is new is not the phenomenon but the scale, the speed, and the deliberateness with which it is now cultivated — and its extension beyond celebrity into the AI tools that are increasingly designed to generate the felt experience of genuine relationship. Simone Schnall, professor of experimental social psychology at Cambridge, noted in response to the dictionary’s selection that the rise of parasocial relationships has redefined not just celebrity and fandom, but how ordinary people interact with technology itself (Cambridge Dictionary, 2025). The social brain cannot fully distinguish between a relationship and a sufficiently convincing simulation of one. That tendency has been present across much of human history. The infrastructure built around it is the achievement of the past hundred years.

Part 1 — The Mechanism: What the Brain Is Reaching For

The conditions described in the preceding section — the modern manufacture of aspirational figures, the industrial management of ego ideal projection, the aspiration cascade of the digital era — are the environment in which the mechanism described in this section now operates. The social brain’s reaching toward another person’s identity is not new. The scale at which it is cultivated, the sophistication with which it is exploited, and the sheer density of aspirational figures available to project onto are entirely modern. What follows describes the psychological terrain of that reaching: not the cultural conditions that intensify it, but the internal experience of moving along it.

The Ego Ideal and the Forward-Reaching Self

The concept of the ego ideal — introduced by Freud and subsequently elaborated within object relations theory — describes the internal image of who or what a person aspires to become (Freud, 1914). In its early psychoanalytic formulation, it is the idealised self projected forward: the person I believe I should be, or could be, set against the self I currently experience myself to be. The tension between the two is not simply painful — it is motivating. The ego ideal is one of the primary engines of human development.

In childhood, the ego ideal is typically projected outward onto figures who appear to embody capacities the child does not yet feel they possess. In early life this tends to land most often on parents and older siblings — the people whose competence and apparent ease the child most closely observes, whose approval most powerfully organises their behaviour, and whose characteristics they are most continuously exposed to. As development proceeds and the peer group becomes the primary social world, the projection increasingly shifts toward peers and toward figures further afield — teachers, celebrities, athletes, fictional characters, the cool child three years above at school.

This shifting of the ego ideal from family onto peers and broader cultural figures is a normal and necessary part of development. The adolescent who admires a musician, models their social presentation on a peer, or constructs an aspirational identity around a public figure is not displaying immaturity. They are doing the developmental work of identity formation — using admiration as a tool for trying on possible selves, holding them against themselves to see which fits, and gradually constructing a coherent sense of who they are and who they want to become.

The ego ideal becomes problematic not when it is present, but when it is experienced as impossibly distant — when the gap between the current self and the admired other is felt not as something to be bridged by growth, but as a fixed verdict on the inadequacy of the self that already exists.

The Social Comparison That Confirms Rather Than Motivates

Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory provides the complementary account. The human need to evaluate one’s own qualities, abilities, and social standing by reference to others is a fundamental cognitive process, active from early childhood and intensifying substantially in adolescence. It is not a vanity or a weakness — it is how the social brain calibrates itself. In the absence of any absolute standard by which human qualities can be measured, comparison with others is the only available instrument.

Upward social comparison — measuring oneself against someone perceived as more capable, more confident, or more socially successful — is the direction in which admiration and idealisation operate. In its functional form, this motivates. The gap is felt as a challenge, and the admired other becomes a model of what might be possible.

The picture changes when the gap is experienced as fixed and unclosable. Dai and Rinn’s (2008) review of social comparison research in children identifies a consistent split: upward comparison in contexts where the comparer believes growth is possible tends to support motivation and aspiration; upward comparison in contexts where the gap is experienced as reflecting a stable and unalterable inadequacy tends to produce shame, withdrawal, and the collapse of aspiration. The admired other stops being a model and becomes a mirror — reflecting back not a possible future self but the inadequacy of the current one.

What determines which direction the comparison goes? In large part, the internal working model — the implicit set of expectations about one’s own social worth that was built in the earliest attachment relationships and typically carried forward into subsequent relational contexts. A child whose earliest experience provided a stable expectation of being valued, noticed, and wanted by others approaches social comparison with a working assumption of bridgeability — the gap is real, but it can be crossed. A child whose earliest experience built a working model around uncertainty about their own acceptability, or around the expectation that connection is conditional and precarious, approaches the same comparison with a different expectation already loaded. The gap is felt not as a challenge but as a confirmation. And when confirmation of inadequacy replaces aspiration, the reaching toward another person’s identity intensifies in a specific direction: toward borrowing what cannot be built, rather than building what is not yet there.

The Belonging Gap and What Fills It

The attachment literature is unambiguous on the question of what early relational experience contributes to later social functioning. Bowlby’s (1969; 1973; 1988) internal working model — the implicit relational blueprint built in the earliest caregiving relationship — shapes not just how a person approaches close relationships in adulthood, but how they experience the ordinary encounters of social life: the gathering in an unfamiliar room, the first day in a new place, the group that has already formed before they arrived.

A secure internal working model — built in a relational environment that was reliably warm, predictably responsive, and willing to repair rupture — creates a felt expectation that social connection is broadly available, that reaching out tends to be met, and that one’s own presence in a social world is not conditional on continuous performance. That expectation is not a thought. It is a calibration of the nervous system — a resting orientation toward social situations that Porges’ Polyvagal Theory (1994; 2011) describes in terms of the ventral vagal state: the physiological ground from which social engagement is possible.

An insecure internal working model creates a different calibration. Not necessarily an inability to connect — many people with insecure attachment histories build warm, sustaining relationships across their lives — but a different default orientation to social situations, a different read on the safety of social risk, a different threshold for the experience of social threat. The nervous system that has learned, in its earliest data-gathering years, that social connection is conditional or unreliable, brings that learning forward. It is not carrying a belief. It is carrying a body-level expectation, operating at a speed that precedes conscious reflection, that shapes social experience before the person has had time to think about it.

The belonging gap — the felt discrepancy between the connection the social brain requires and the connection that is available — is widest in people whose internal working model combines the expectation of social inadequacy with limited access to the experience that would revise it. When the belonging gap is wide, and the ordinary routes to closing it feel unavailable or unreliable, the social brain reaches toward alternative strategies. Idealisation of another person — reaching toward their identity as a resource — is one of the most consistent of those strategies, across age groups, across cultures, and across the full range of developmental experience.

Part 2 — The Spectrum

The spectrum from interest to assimilation is not a taxonomy of types of people. It is a description of positions that the same person may occupy at different times, in different contexts, in relation to different figures. Most people spend most of their lives somewhere in the interest–fandom range, moving toward obsession during periods of acute belonging gap — transitions, losses, periods of role uncertainty or identity disruption — and moving back as the gap closes.

What the spectrum maps is not pathology. It maps distance from the self. At the interest end, the self is intact, curious, and using the admired other as a resource. At the assimilation end, the self has been substantially replaced. The journey between those points is driven by the size of the belonging gap, the depth of the attachment insecurity that shapes the response to it, and the absence of other routes by which the gap might be closed.

Interest

Interest is the baseline expression of the mechanism — so ordinary and so continuous that it rarely registers as a discrete phenomenon at all. A child notices a peer who moves through social situations with an ease they do not feel in themselves, and is drawn toward them — seeking their proximity, attentive to their signals, lifted by a moment of genuine acknowledgement. An adult observes a colleague who speaks in a meeting with a confidence they experience as absent in themselves, and finds their attention pulled back to that person, using them — consciously or not — as a model against which to calibrate their own performance.

At this stage, the ego ideal is doing its ordinary developmental work. The admired other is held at a distance that preserves the self’s integrity. There is no confusion between the self that exists and the other who is admired. The admired other is a reference point — a living example of what the social brain is reaching toward — and the self uses that reference point to orient itself, without losing its own ground in the process.

Fandom

Fandom is the organised social form of interest — the point at which individual admiration becomes collective identification. The fan relationship with a musician, an athlete, a sports club, a fictional character, or a public figure involves something qualitatively different from individual admiration: the admired figure becomes the focus of a shared identity that connects the fan not only to the figure but to a community of other fans.

Horton and Wohl (1956) introduced the concept of the parasocial relationship — the one-sided intimacy that develops between an audience member and a media figure, characterised by the familiarity, emotional investment, and sense of connection that marks genuine social relationships, without the reciprocity that genuine relationships require. The media figure speaks; the fan listens. The fan responds — emotionally, behaviourally, in terms of the attention they invest — but the figure does not know the fan exists. The relationship is real in its psychological effects; it is asymmetrical in its structure.

Research on fan communities and adolescent identity development consistently finds that fan affiliation tends to serve healthy identity functions: providing a sense of distinctiveness within a peer group, organising a social world around shared enthusiasm, offering low-stakes entry points into social relationships that might otherwise be more difficult to initiate (Stever, 2011; Duffett, 2013). The stereotype of the fan as someone who has substituted a parasocial fantasy for real social life is, in most cases, precisely wrong. Fan community membership tends to support — rather than replace — real-world social connection.

The most systematic empirical mapping of fandom’s internal spectrum comes from McCutcheon, Maltby, and colleagues, who developed the Celebrity Attitude Scale across a series of studies that established three increasingly intense levels of celebrity worship (McCutcheon, Lange, and Houran, 2002; Maltby et al., 2002; 2003). The first level — entertainment-social — reflects attraction to a celebrity for their entertainment value and social currency: talking about them, sharing enthusiasm, using them as common ground with other fans. This is the healthy core of fandom, sitting squarely within the fandom band of this spectrum. The second level — intense-personal — involves more compulsive and intensive feelings: a strong identification with the celebrity, a preoccupation that begins to resemble obsession. The third level — borderline-pathological — involves a collapse of the self-other boundary closer to assimilation: the fan who tends to believe a reciprocal relationship genuinely exists, whose sense of self is organised entirely around the celebrity, whose behaviour may extend to stalking or other legally significant acts.

McCutcheon and colleagues proposed the absorption-addiction model to account for movement between levels: the fan begins by absorbing the celebrity’s presence as a resource for managing a belonging deficit; the absorption intensifies until more contact is required to sustain the same sense of fulfilment; the dynamic takes on the structural qualities of behavioural addiction — tolerance, escalation, and withdrawal effects when the stimulus is removed (McCutcheon et al., 2002). A compromised identity structure is the most consistent predisposing factor: the person for whom celebrity relationship becomes absorbing to a pathological degree is characteristically a person for whom ordinary routes to identity and belonging have proven insufficient. The model maps directly onto the spectrum this essay describes, and gives it empirical grounding: the journey from interest to assimilation is not a conceptual construct. It is a measurable psychological progression with identifiable stages.

The community dimension of fandom, which provides much of its healthy belonging function, carries its own complexity. Research using social identity theory finds that the strength of fans’ parasocial relationships with their idols is positively associated with in-group identification — but also with out-group hostility and behavioural aggression toward members of other fan communities (Forner et al., 2025). The belonging that fandom generates is real; it is also, at higher intensities, potentially tribal. The fan community that provides genuine inclusion for its members may simultaneously organise itself in opposition to other communities — replicating, within the fandom context, the same exclusion-and-belonging dynamics that originally drove the individual toward fandom in the first place. The social brain finds belonging; it also, given sufficient intensity of group identification, sometimes finds enemies.

The question that marks the boundary between fandom and the next stage of the spectrum is not how intense the investment is. It is whether the self is preserved. Does the fan use the admired figure as a reference point and the fan community as a social resource, while remaining recognisably themselves? Or has the admired figure begun to reorganise the fan’s sense of self to the point where the boundary between admirer and admired is becoming unclear?

Obsession

Obsession is the point on the spectrum where the belonging gap has become acute enough that the mechanism shifts from resource to management — where the admired other is no longer a reference point held at a distance, but a cognitive presence that occupies an expanding share of the person’s mental and emotional life, and against which the self is increasingly measured and found wanting.

The cognitive signature of obsession is preoccupation — the admired figure returning to the centre of attention repeatedly, outside the contexts in which they would naturally be relevant, with an insistence that the person did not choose and cannot easily redirect. The emotional signature is a characteristic combination of longing and inadequacy: the admired other represents something so urgently wanted and so experientially unavailable that proximity to their image or presence produces not just admiration but a heightened awareness of the gap between the self that exists and the self that is desired.

The behavioural expression begins to shift at this stage. Where the person in the interest or fandom zone uses the admired other as a model while retaining their own preferences and identity, the person moving into obsession begins to filter their own choices, interests, and self-presentation through the admired other’s implicit or explicit standards. Not as a conscious strategy — this is not deliberate performance — but as the natural expression of a self that is increasingly organised around an external reference point rather than an internal one.

This is the point at which the Winnicottian frame becomes relevant. Winnicott’s (1960) concept of the true self — the spontaneous, alive, authentic core of experience that emerges when the environment is sufficiently responsive and safe — and the false self — the adaptive, compliant, audience-oriented presentation built to manage an environment that the true self has learned will not accept it — describes a dynamic that begins in infancy but continues to operate across the lifespan wherever a person finds themselves in a relational environment that feels contingent or unsafe. The person who moves into obsessive idealisation of another is, in effect, beginning to construct the admired other’s characteristics as a false self — not deceiving anyone consciously, but gradually replacing their spontaneous self-expression with a managed version calibrated to what the admired other represents.

The attachment underpinning of this shift is consistent. Obsessive idealisation tends to be associated with anxious attachment configurations — with the internal working model that holds connection as conditional, precarious, and requiring continuous performance to maintain (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007). The person who holds a deep uncertainty about their own acceptability is the person most likely, when the belonging gap widens, to reach for a borrowed identity as a solution: if the self that already exists is not enough to secure connection, perhaps the self of the admired other — who appears to belong with ease — will be.

What the historical record of Lisztomania and Beatlemania showed — and what contemporary clinical observation tends to confirm — is that the obsession zone of the spectrum is not purely a cognitive or relational event. It is also somatic. The intensity of the preoccupation is carried in the body: the physical agitation of encountering the admired figure’s image or presence, the visceral drop of perceived rejection or distance, the anxiety symptoms that attend the continuous management of a borrowed self that must be sustained without ever fully fitting. The belonging gap, at this point on the spectrum, is not only a psychological experience. It is a body state — one that the nervous system is managing at significant cost, and one that practitioners familiar with the polyvagal framework will recognise in its signature combination of hyperarousal and social vigilance. The person at this point on the spectrum is not simply preoccupied. They are regulated — or failing to be regulated — through the admired other’s presence or absence in their perceptual world.

The minor celebrity economy of the contemporary digital era is specifically potent at this point on the spectrum, for a reason the demigod model rarely produced. The B-list figure offers apparent accessibility — something the Hollywood star rarely could. The gap between the admirer and the admired appears closable. The celebrity posts from their kitchen, shares their anxieties, tags their purchases — the distance between their life and the follower’s life is presented as a matter of degree rather than kind. This felt accessibility holds the obsession in place more effectively than inaccessibility does. The demigod’s distance, ultimately, concedes the gap is unbridgeable. The accessible celebrity keeps the aspiration alive without ever satisfying it — sustaining the obsession zone without ever resolving it, which is both the most commercially productive possible arrangement and the most psychologically costly for the person caught within it.

The difficulty with this strategy is structurally identical to the difficulty with all false-self adaptations: it is inherently unstable. Connection obtained through performance of a borrowed identity is connection that depends on the maintenance of the performance. It does not resolve the underlying uncertainty. It makes belonging contingent on remaining sufficiently like the admired other — which means the original self must be continuously suppressed, and any sign that the performance is failing becomes an acute threat.

Assimilation

At the far end of the spectrum sits the position in which the borrowed identity has substantially replaced the original — in which the self that existed before the reaching began has been so thoroughly suppressed in favour of the admired other’s characteristics, interests, social affiliations, and self-presentation that very little of it remains visible.

Assimilation, in this sense, is not a sudden event. It is the outcome of a gradual process that proceeds incrementally along the spectrum — each step a small and explicable response to the belonging gap, each step making the next step slightly easier and the original self slightly harder to access. By the time assimilation is complete, the person may not experience themselves as having adopted a borrowed identity. They may experience themselves simply as being who they are — without registering that who they are has been substantially constituted by an extended process of suppression and replacement.

The Winnicottian false self is the most precise theoretical account of what has happened here. What began as a genuine self-expression has been replaced — not through deception, but through the cumulative logic of managing an environment that felt unable to accept the self that existed. The false self is not felt as false by the person who lives in it. It is felt as necessary, as the only version of the self that has been found to work — to secure the inclusion and approval that the social brain requires.

The clinical literature on identity diffusion — the failure to develop a stable, coherent sense of self — is relevant at this end of the spectrum, as is the research on the relationship between insecure attachment and identity development in adolescence (Meeus, 2011). What Erikson (1968) called role confusion — the failure of the adolescent identity task, in which the person remains in a state of identity uncertainty rather than reaching a consolidated sense of self — is not merely a developmental delay. For people whose internal working model has consistently organised around the expectation of their own unacceptability, the reaching toward another’s identity is not role confusion. It is a coherent, if costly, solution to the problem of not knowing who they are allowed to be.

The cost is that the borrowed identity, by its nature, does not fit. It was built for someone else’s nervous system, someone else’s history, someone else’s way of being in the world. Wearing it generates a chronic low-level dissonance — the mismatch between who the person presents themselves as and what they actually experience. And when the admired figure changes, or withdraws, or reveals themselves as more ordinary than the idealisation required, the collapse can be severe — not simply the ending of a relationship, but the dissolution of the self that had been constructed around them.

Part 3 — Across the Lifespan

The spectrum is present at most stages of life, but the developmental moment shapes which zones predominate and what drives movement along the continuum.

Early and Middle Childhood

The belonging drive in early childhood is already operational — the social brain is building its architecture from the first months of life, and the pleasure of being sought out by a peer is real and significant long before the child has words for it. But the ego ideal mechanism in early childhood primarily targets family figures and older children rather than same-age peers, and the cognitive apparatus for sustained upward social comparison is not yet fully in place.

What appears in middle childhood is the first significant peer idealisation — the child who wants to sit next to the one who seems at ease, who notices when that child acknowledges them, who feels the small but significant lift of being liked by someone they admire. This is the interest register operating in its most ordinary form. The admired peer is a model of social ease; the admiring child uses that model to orient their own social reaching.

The signal worth attending to in this age group is not the presence of admiration — it is the exclusive investment of social energy in a single admired peer, to the exclusion of any other social connection, combined with a self-presentation that has visibly altered in the direction of the admired child. A six-year-old who wants to be friends with the child who seems to be well-liked is doing something entirely ordinary. A six-year-old who has abandoned their own interests, adopted the admired child’s manner of speaking, and shows no investment in any other social relationship is showing something that warrants gentler attention.

Adolescence

Adolescence is the developmental epicentre of the spectrum — the period in which the belonging drive reaches its highest intensity, the ego ideal is most actively engaged, and the conditions for movement toward the concerning end of the spectrum are most fully present.

The neurological basis of this is well established. The prefrontal cortex — which supports the kind of secure, self-aware identity that can hold an admired other as a resource without losing itself in them — is undergoing substantial remodelling throughout adolescence. The limbic system, which drives the emotional intensity of social experience and the threat response to exclusion, is operating at heightened sensitivity. The result, as Blakemore and Choudhury (2006) describe, is a period of maximum social sensitivity in the context of minimum self-regulatory capacity — the worst possible combination for managing the intensity of the ego ideal without being overwhelmed by it.

Erikson’s (1968) framing of adolescence as the developmental stage of identity versus role confusion identifies the peer group as the laboratory in which this work is done. The adolescent tries on possible selves — different styles, different affiliations, different ways of presenting, different versions of who they might become — using the social mirror of the peer group to read which versions generate inclusion and which generate exclusion. Some degree of imitation of admired peers is intrinsic to this process. The adolescent who borrows a peer’s manner of speaking, adopts their musical tastes, or structures their social affiliations around a person they admire is doing identity work — not losing themselves, but using admiration as a developmental instrument.

Fan culture in adolescence deserves specific attention here. The intensity of adolescent fandom — the parasocial investment in musicians, actors, athletes, YouTubers, or fictional characters — is often regarded by adults as trivial at best and concerning at worst. The research suggests a more nuanced picture. Adolescent fandom tends to serve real identity functions: it provides a coherent organising framework for self-presentation, a community of shared enthusiasm that creates real belonging, and a set of values and aesthetics against which the developing self can measure itself. The teenager whose bedroom walls are covered in posters, whose social life revolves around concert attendance or online fan community engagement, and whose sense of self is substantially organised around their fan identity is not avoiding identity development. They are doing it — through one of the available instruments.

The point at which this warrants attention is the same as at other ages: when the boundary between self and admired other begins to dissolve; when the fan identity begins to crowd out rather than supplement the developing self; when the intensity of the investment is driven not by genuine enthusiasm but by the management of a belonging anxiety that has no other outlet.

Young Adulthood

The ego ideal mechanism does not retire at the end of adolescence. It shifts domain. The young adult entering a professional environment, a new social world, or a significant relationship brings the same mechanism forward — the same social brain, now encountering new contexts in which belonging must be established and identity consolidated, using the same tools it always has.

The most common form in young adulthood is mentor idealisation — the investment of the ego ideal in a figure whose professional confidence, social ease, or life coherence seems to embody what the young adult most wants for themselves. The senior colleague whose judgment seems effortlessly sound. The older friend who appears to have navigated the uncertainties of early adulthood with a grace that the admirer has not yet found. Levinson’s (1978) account of adult development describes the mentor relationship as a structural feature of the early adult phase — a relationship in which the younger person uses the admired other as a model, advocate, and developmental resource, without losing their own trajectory in the process. The mentor is a figure who makes the possible self more visible, more concrete, more achievable — not a figure whose identity is adopted wholesale.

The risk in young adulthood, as in earlier stages, is the movement from mentorship toward merger — the young adult who so thoroughly organises their professional and personal identity around a single admired figure that the loss or disillusionment of that relationship becomes an identity crisis rather than a personal loss.

Midlife and Later

The mechanism is present in midlife and beyond, though the literature has paid it less attention than it deserves. The belonging gap can open at any point in a life, and the triggers in later adulthood tend to be the major identity disruptions that this stage characteristically brings: the end of a significant relationship, redundancy or retirement, bereavement, the departure of children, the loss of a social role that has been central to self-definition.

What is being reached toward at this stage is typically not social ease in the adolescent sense — not the confidence of the peer who navigates the group with effortless inclusion — but something more grounded: stability, equanimity, the appearance of having survived transition without losing one’s self. The person who has just experienced divorce and finds themselves drawn to someone who seems to have navigated a similar transition with apparent wholeness is engaging in the same mechanism. The belonging gap has been torn open by loss; the ego ideal reaches toward someone who appears to have what is most urgently wanted; the spectrum activates.

The protective factor in midlife, when it is present, is a more consolidated identity than adolescence typically provides — a self that has been built over decades and has some depth to it. But consolidated identity is not the same as immunity. People who have lived for many years in roles — partner, parent, professional — that have done much of their identity work for them may find, when those roles are removed, that the self beneath them is less developed than they had assumed. The belonging gap that opens at this point can be surprisingly wide, and the mechanism that moves along the spectrum in response can be surprisingly intense.

Part 4 — What Parents See, and Often Misread

The spectrum, observed from the parent’s position, tends to present not as a theoretical sequence but as a cluster of behaviours that are puzzling, faintly alarming, or simply very different from what the parent expected to see. Making sense of those behaviours — understanding what they are actually expressing, as distinct from what they appear to be — is the purpose of this section.

The Sudden Loss of the Child They Recognised

One of the most consistent parental experiences when a child moves along the spectrum toward obsession or beyond is the sense of having lost the child they knew. The interests, preferences, speech patterns, social affiliations, and general manner of the child they raised have been substantially replaced — sometimes rapidly, sometimes gradually — by something that appears to belong to someone else. The child who loved one thing now loves another, and the previous passion has vanished with a completeness that seems to preclude it having been genuine. The child who spoke in one way now speaks in another. The child who valued certain friendships now invests all their social energy in a single admired peer and appears barely aware that other relationships exist.

This experience is disorienting for parents precisely because what they are observing is, to some extent, real. The child is borrowing an identity. The borrowed characteristics are not disguise or performance in any conscious sense — the child has adopted them because they serve a purpose. They are the most available solution to a belonging gap that the child has not found another way to close. The parent’s instinct that something is missing is not wrong. The self the child had before this began is harder to access than it was — suppressed, not destroyed, but currently unavailable in the way it previously was.

The misread that tends to follow this observation is the attribution of cause to influence rather than need. The child is like this because of the peer they have attached to, or the fan community they have joined, or the media they are consuming. Address the influence and the child will return. This attribution is understandable but inverted. The influence did not create the belonging gap. It gave the gap a direction. The peer or figure toward whom the child has turned is not the problem. They are the most visible symptom of a need that preceded them.

Disproportionate Distress

The second consistent parental observation is distress that does not match its apparent cause. The friendship that hits a difficult patch, or comes to an end, produces a response that seems far too large for what the friendship visibly was. The admired figure who disappoints, changes, or becomes unavailable generates a reaction that the parent experiences as catastrophic and bewildering. The fan community that fractures, or expels the child, or simply changes in ways that remove the belonging it provided, leaves a crater that the parent cannot account for by the loss alone.

The distress, in these cases, is not solely about the friend or the figure or the community. It is about the collapse of the social solution the child had constructed around them. What is being lost is not simply a relationship. It is the entire belonging architecture that was built on that relationship — the sense of identity, the felt connection, the management of an underlying anxiety that the admired person or community was providing.

This is why the grief of these endings tends to have a quality distinct from ordinary friendship loss. Ordinary friendship loss — real, and significant — tends to leave the child sad but still recognisably themselves. The collapse of an obsessive attachment tends to leave the child without access to any secure sense of self — because the self that was available before the attachment began has been suppressed, and the self that was built around the attachment has now dissolved. What remains is the belonging gap in its original, unmanaged state, often with the additional weight of having been held at bay for some time.

The Successive Pattern

A single intense idealisation, however consuming while it lasts, is not in itself a signal that something requires attention beyond ordinary parental curiosity. The signal that is worth holding more carefully is a pattern — the second intense idealisation following the collapse of the first, then the third, then the fourth, each with the same quality of total investment, the same apparent self-erasure, and the same acute collapse when the relationship or affiliation ends.

What the pattern reveals is that the mechanism is not being used, as it is in its healthy form, to build a self — but to manage an anxiety that does not get resolved by the relationship, only temporarily held at bay by it. Each successive idealisation is a fresh attempt to close the belonging gap through the same strategy that has not worked before. The gap remains because the strategy, by its structure, cannot close it. It can only occupy the space where the gap was, for as long as the admired other is available to occupy it.

The Target as a Map

One of the most practically useful observations about idealisation in children — and one that tends to reframe parental concern in a more productive direction — is that the target of idealisation is not random. It tends to target whoever carries, for this particular child, the quality they most urgently want for themselves.

This may be social ease — the effortless navigation of peer relationships that the child experiences as absent in themselves. It may be a kind of physical confidence, or creative fluency, or the apparent indifference to others’ opinions that the child desperately wishes they could access. It may be something harder to name — a quality of being at home in one’s own skin that the child has rarely felt and wants intensely.

The admired figure is, in this sense, a map of the child’s unmet developmental needs. Reading the map — understanding what quality in the admired other is drawing the child’s investment — is more useful than addressing the idealisation itself. The idealisation is the symptom. The need it is pointing toward is the thing worth attending to.

What the Research Suggests About Conditions That Help

The IWI position holds here as it does throughout the YFL content: what the research shows about what conditions tend to support healthy identity development, not a prescriptive protocol.

Contexts in which the child experiences genuine belonging — not belonging contingent on performance, but belonging that persists through difficulty and change — tend to reduce the intensity of the reaching along the spectrum. Not through direct intervention on the idealisation, but through offering the belonging gap something real to close around. The parent who provides a consistent, warm, non-contingent experience of being known and valued — who remains curious about who the child is beneath the borrowed self — is not treating the idealisation. They are providing the conditions in which the original self remains accessible enough to eventually re-emerge.

Attempting to address the idealisation directly — criticising the admired peer, restricting access to the fan community, or arguing for the inadequacy of the admired figure — tends to be counterproductive. It positions the parent as a threat to the only belonging solution the child currently has, and tends to produce defensive intensification rather than the loosening that would allow the original self to resurface.

Part 5 — What Professionals See

Teachers, social workers, and therapeutic practitioners occupy a distinctive vantage point on this spectrum — close enough to observe it systematically, sufficiently external to the child’s primary social world to see it with some perspective, and professionally responsible for making sense of what they observe in ways that serve the child’s interests.

The Social Landscape the Teacher Sees

In school settings, the spectrum tends to be visible primarily through the social dynamics of the peer group — through who gravitates toward whom, through the texture of social investment, through the quality of distress when particular relationships are disrupted. Among a class of children there will typically be a small number who show the pattern of intense, one-directional investment in a single peer, and whose emotional state is substantially organised around the status and availability of that relationship.

What this tends to look like in the classroom is often unremarkable at first glance. The child is present, attending, producing work. It is in the unstructured periods — the lunch break, the corridor between lessons, the informal social time — that the investment becomes visible. The child whose eyes track a particular peer, whose mood visibly shifts with that peer’s attention or inattention, who has no apparent social resource other than this single relationship. This child is not necessarily distressed in any way that would generate a referral or a welfare concern. They are managing — using the available solution — and that management may look, from a distance, like ordinary friendship.

The signal worth carrying is the exclusivity and the intensity: not simply that the child values one friendship above others, but that the entire social apparatus appears organised around a single other person, and that any threat to that relationship produces a response disproportionate to what is visible.

The Social Care Context

Social work and therapeutic practice with children adds specific layers to this picture. Children who have experienced relational disruption — including looked-after children, children whose family experience has included domestic abuse, children whose early attachment environment was inconsistent or frightening — tend to bring to the peer social world a belonging gap that is both wider and less remediable by ordinary peer experience than the gap brought by children with more secure attachment histories.

The intensity of idealisation in children with disrupted attachment histories often reflects not simply a present belonging gap but an accumulated relational hunger — the longing for the consistent, available, genuinely warm connection that early experience did not provide, now reaching toward a peer who appears to embody something of that quality. The peer is not, of course, a caregiver. But they are the nearest available figure who carries something the child’s nervous system recognises as belonging to the category of what is most urgently wanted.

This creates a particular vulnerability in the transition points that social care children experience disproportionately — changes of placement, school moves, the disruption of peer relationships that are themselves the only stable relational resource the child currently has. Understanding the intensity of the response to these disruptions requires understanding what the relationship was actually managing, not simply what it visibly was.

When the Professional Is the Idealised Figure

There is a dimension of this spectrum that falls within the direct professional experience of anyone who works relationally with children or young people, and which warrants specific consideration: the professional who becomes the idealised figure.

It tends to happen most often with practitioners who are consistent, warm, and genuinely attuned — qualities that, in the context of a child’s relational history, may be experienced as extraordinary rather than ordinary. The child who has not had reliable access to an adult who is curious about them, who shows up consistently, and who seems to value their presence, may reach toward a practitioner who provides these things with an intensity that the practitioner did not invite and does not know how to hold.

The dynamic is not problematic in its presence — it is a natural expression of the mechanism this essay has described throughout. What matters is how it is held by the practitioner. A practitioner who understands what is happening — who can recognise the idealisation as the expression of a belonging need rather than an interpersonal reality, who can maintain genuine warmth and consistency while holding appropriate professional boundaries, and who uses supervision to process what the dynamic generates in themselves — is in a position to offer the child something genuinely useful: a corrective relational experience in which the reaching toward another is met with steady, boundaried warmth rather than withdrawal, reciprocation, or unconscious exploitation.

A practitioner who does not understand what is happening is in a more difficult position. The idealisation can generate, in the professional, responses that are not straightforwardly helpful: discomfort and withdrawal that the child experiences as another iteration of unreliable connection; unconscious reciprocation that reinforces the dynamic rather than gently redirecting it; or — in the most concerning cases — an exploitation of the child’s reaching that moves into territory that is professionally and ethically outside the bounds of any helping relationship.

The professional boundary is not a barrier to connection. It is the structure within which connection can be offered safely — the frame that makes it possible to be genuinely present with a child’s idealisation without either collapsing into it or retreating from it. Supervision is the space in which this work is processed; professional training is where the recognition of the dynamic is built. Both are necessary.

The Distinction That Matters Professionally

The distinction that practitioners in education and social care settings most need to be able to make is between three related but different phenomena: idealisation of a peer, idealisation of a professional, and the beginning of an unhealthy attachment to an adult outside professional contexts.

Idealisation of a peer is managed within the child’s own social world. The practitioner’s role is awareness and monitoring — understanding that the relationship is carrying more than it appears to, and that any disruption to it will land with weight.

Idealisation of a professional is managed within the professional relationship itself — through the practitioner’s own self-awareness, through supervision, and through the maintenance of genuine professional boundaries that allow the dynamic to be held without being either exploited or foreclosed.

The beginning of an unhealthy attachment to an adult outside professional contexts — a coach, a neighbour, a family friend, an online contact — who may or may not understand what the child is reaching toward, and who may or may not have the child’s wellbeing as their primary interest, warrants a different response. The practitioner who observes a child investing the ego ideal with intensity in a non-professional adult relationship has a specific safeguarding obligation: not to pathologise the child’s need, but to understand what that need is making the child vulnerable to, and to ensure that the adults with responsibility for the child’s safety are thinking clearly about what is happening.

Conclusion — What the Reaching Is For

The spectrum described in this essay — from the ordinary admiration of interest through the organised identification of fandom, into the consuming preoccupation of obsession and the identity replacement of assimilation — is not a hierarchy of health and disorder. It is a map of how far the social brain has had to travel to find what it most urgently requires.

Belonging is not a preference. It is, as the neuroscience of social exclusion shows, as fundamental a need as physical safety. When ordinary routes to it are open — when the internal working model is secure enough to reach out, when the social world is accessible enough to reach toward, when the conditions of early and ongoing relational experience have built a self that feels sufficiently acceptable to risk being known — the ego ideal operates in its healthy register. Interest and fandom tend to serve development. The self is built by the reaching rather than sacrificed to it.

When those routes are narrowed — by an insecure internal working model, by temperamental social wariness, by the disruption of transition, by the accumulated weight of relational experience that has consistently told a self it is not quite enough — the reaching intensifies. The borrowed identity becomes a solution. And the further along the spectrum the solution travels, the more it tends to cost the self that was there before the reaching began.

The question that serves children, young people, and adults who find themselves somewhere along this spectrum is not simply: why are they doing this? The mechanism is intelligible. It is the social brain doing what it was built to do, under conditions that have made the ordinary routes unavailable. The question that is actually useful is: what is the belonging gap that is driving this, and what conditions — relational, developmental, environmental — might allow that gap to be met in a way that builds a self rather than borrows one?

Answering that question is the work that parents, practitioners, and the people themselves can do. The spectrum is not destiny. The self that is suppressed at the assimilation end of the spectrum is not destroyed. It is waiting — for the conditions under which it is safe to re-emerge.

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