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Another specific contribution made by Winnicott in the theorisation of the transference pertains to destructiveness. In “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications” Winnicott (1968) describes the indispensable vital and destructive thrust that allows the subject, whether a child or a borderline patient, to allow for the existence of the object or the analyst outside the sphere of control of his omnipotence, outside the sphere of his subjective phenomena provided the object survives the transferential attacks. Thanks to this fundamental ordeal, “fantasy begins for the individual. The subject can now use the object that has survived” (Winnicott, 1968, p. 90). If such an experience fails to take place, then, for the patient, the analyst forever remains a mere projection of a part of his self . In “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” Winnicott (1947) stresses the ambivalence experienced by the analyst when facing challenging patients. The patient evokes a kind of hate which is not particular in itself but whose intensity is specific to the situation in question. “In the ordinary analysis the analyst has no difficulty with the management of his own hate. […] In the analysis of psychotics, however, quite a different type and degree of strain is taken by the analyst, and it is precisely this different strain that I am trying to describe” (Winnicott, 1947, p. 197). According to Winnicott, this difference in intensity between neurosis and psychosis stems from the considerable gap between the respective experiences of early relations and interactions. In a theorization that relies, in part, on Winnicottian notions, René Roussillon (2011) discusses patients suffering from narcissistic identity disorders who develop a paradoxical form of transference, “a kind of transference in which something is ‘turned back’: the analysand, split off from any possibility of integrating a particular past experience, puts the analyst through that experience” (Roussillon, 2011, p. 6). “Thus it is that the world of the transference is dominated more by issues involving negativity than by integration and linking. At the same time, destructiveness, or certain forms of the death drives, take over from the libido; the relationship to the object appears to be subordinated to the idea of the use of the object rather than to the more ‘classic’ idea of object relations” (ibid ., p.7). IV. D. Wilfred R. Bion Bion, for his part, develops Melanie Klein’s theory while also relying heavily on the Freudian corpus. Examining the formation of thoughts within psychic life, Bion introduces the concept of the alpha function in his “Learning from Experience” (Bion 1962a), which allows the sensory experiences and the emotions – the beta elements – to become alpha elements and thus to be able to be memorised, symbolised and used in thoughts and in dreams. Such transformation posited at the root of the psyche yields a view of the conscious and the unconscious as reversible mental states within the mental experience. In some of his work focusing on psychotic functioning, Bion (1956, 1959) differentiates between the psychotic and the non-psychotic part of the personality. He thus develops the concept of projective identification described by Melanie Klein, with reference to the transference of the split destructive components projected onto the analyst, and he endows it
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