identify with someone, identify someone with someone else

[1] Collins Cobuild:  identify

5. VERB. If you identify with someone or something, you feel that you understand them or their feelings and ideas.    

• She would only play a role if she could identify with the character.
  

6. VERB. If you identify one person or thing with another, you think that they are closely associated or involved in some way.    

• She hates playing the sweet, passive women that audiences identify her with.    
• The candidates all want to identify themselves with reform.  
• =  associate   

[2] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: identify-Usage Note: 

1. In the sense "to associate or affiliate (oneself) closely with a person or group," identify suggests a psychological empathy with the feelings or experiences of another person, as in: 
   
   Most young readers of The Catcher in the Rye will readily identify (or identify themselves) with Holden Caulfield. 
   
   This usage derives originally from psychoanalytic writing, where it has a specific technical meaning, but like other terms from that field, it was widely regarded as jargon when introduced into wider use. 
   
   
2. In particular, some critics seized on the fact that in this sense the verb was often used intransitively, with no reflexive pronoun.
   
   
3. In recent years, however, this use of "identify with" without the reflexive has become standard and may have become even more conventional than the reflexive construction.
   
   Eighty-two percent of the Usage Panel accepts the sentence:
   

   I find it hard to identify with any of his characters[.] ,

   whereas only 63 percent now accepts this same usage when the reflexive pronoun is used, as in:
   

   I find it hard to identify myself with any of his characters.

2008.12.29

※ The posting date adjusted to today April 28, 2o09 to put this review 

into my recent memory, so to speak, recent blog memory.