A Psychoanalytical Note on Naming and Renaming

Lee, Byung Wook

Abstract

Naming is very important event in our lives because personal names are very meaningful in terms of their powerful influences on our everyday lives. We all begin to our lives with given names just after birth, and while we are growing up, the name naturally becomes to the major part of the ego. The attitude toward name also reflects the ego attitude positively or negatively, at times neurotic. Therefore all parents is very careful to make naming at their baby births. There is an old proverb that the tiger dies and leaves the leather, and the person dies and leaves name behind. This means that our names represent the human dignity, and emphasizes the importance of naming. But there were many persons tried to change their given names. They used the various pen names, stage names, nick names, pseudonyms, anonyms, alias, total or partial renaming. Their renaming behavior is likely to hide many various personal motivations. Their main motivations reveal the personal conflicts and identity problems. Those are the denial of familial origins, or the concealment of native lands, family romances, wishful rebirth fantasies, secondary gainings, dissatisfied self-images, or personal insecurities, self-protectiveness, lowered self-esteems, chronic inferiorities, preserved privacies. Renaming needs to be considerably decisive as well as the religious conversion. But I would like to conclude that the most powerful motivating forces of renaming are the identity crisis and intrafamilial conflicts.