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While for Racker and Heimann, however differently conceptualized, the use of projective identificatory mechanisms in the context of countertransference was the analyst´s identifying response with certain internal objects or self aspects of the patient, Grinberg focused on the archaic communicative aspects of the projective-introjective exchange , a direction which was later picked up by Bion. Grinberg’s initial proposal was that projective counter-identification employs a ‘ short circuit ’ in the analytic couple´s communication. His assumption was that the patient ‘places’ into the analyst´s psyche some aspects of himself or herself with such a projective violence that, as a passive receptor, the analyst actually and concretely assimilates them as his or her own (1956, p. 508). Referring to his concept in connection with acting out, Grinberg (1968) writes: “The analyst who succumbs to the effects of the patient’s pathological projective identifications, might react to them as if he had actually acquired the aspects which were projected on him (the patient’s inner objects or parts of the self). The analyst feels passively ‘ dragged’ into playing the role that the patient in an active, though unconscious, way, literally ‘forced’ upon him. I have called this specific kind of countertransference response ‘projective counter-identification’” (p. 172; emphasis added). As compared to Racker´s complementary countertransference, where the analyst´s emotional response was based on his own anxieties and conflicts, identifying with inner objects similar to those of the analysand, Grinberg conceptualized the analyst´s response as relatively independent of his own conflicts. Grinberg´s merit was to emphasize that the analyst´s own unconscious is not primarily involved, and consequently, that the analyst´s introspection would not be enough to immediately access the roots of such projective counter-identification. Grinberg emphasized what years later came to be known as the irreducible character of the ‘ micro-acting-outs ’ of the countertransference, as an intermediate station in the analyst´s search for insight into the archaic parts of the patient’s psyche. Such a station cannot be avoided if the analyst is to know the entire texture of the transferred object (Grinberg 1982). Grinberg’s (1956) contribution was to see that the analysand’s unconscious intentionality produced effects in the analyst’s psyche through the projective identification, no longer conceived as an intra-subjective fantasy (Klein 1946), but as an interaction process between two minds . Three years later, Bion (1959) explicitly highlighted this communicative side of the projective identification. With the evolution of his ideas on projective counter-identification, Grinberg identified new metapsychological tools to re-conceptualize the analyst’s countertransference. His projective counter-identification stresses the communicative side of projective identification as an enigmatic , ineffable message that could only be expressed through the transference- countertransference dramatization set off by the patient. In the clinical context, this transference-countertransference dramatization anticipated the idea of listening to the most archaic levels of the patient’s psyche by the detour of the enactment , developed years later (Jacobs 1986; Godfrind-Haber&Haber 2002; Mancia 2006; Sapisochin 2013; Cassorla 2013). From the late 1950’s, Bion (1959) and Rosenfeld (1962) developed the concept into the idea that projective identification is an unconscious communication from the analysand. Bion (1959) drew a parallel between the therapeutic interaction and the mode in which the suffering
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