IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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Psychology incorporates both – a focus on intrapsychic conflict, compromise formation, an internal world and intrapsychic fantasy, yet the psyche (of both the patient and the analyst) is also interpersonally and culturally created; transference is a history driven repetition, which analyst interprets to the patient, yet not everything that goes on between the patient and the analyst comes from the patient and patient may also be the interpreter of the analyst’s experience or affect the analyst’s countertransference, and both participants can co-create analytic field, which is, in some sense, more than the sum of the two-person parts. Intersubjective ego psychologists hold both perspectives at the same time and thereby modify each. In the words of Warren Poland (1996), “No single person exists outside a human, object-connected field; the analytic space colors how such a single person comes to understanding by the other and to insight. At the same time, the mind of any individual can be engaged by another yet is always crucially apart, a private universe of inner experience” (Poland, 1996, p. 33). In Chodorow’s (2004) view, it is precisely because psychoanalysis begins from a recognition of the unique subjectivity created in each individual by unconscious affects, drives, fantasies, conflicts, compromise formations, and a personal dynamic history, along with a recognition that two subjects bring their uniqueness to the transference- countertransference analytic field, that they also create, in a particular cultural and analytic environment, that intersubjective ego psychology – the American fusion of ego psychology and relational psychoanalysis – continues to grow. VI. Hb. Example of Multi-Theoretical Post-Kleinian Post-Bionian Perspective Rooted in Freud and Klein, extending and reinterpreting Bion, additionally absorbing thoughts of various Latin American and Italian authors, James Grotstein (2005) has developed a version of intersubjectivity, based on unconscious communication and a dual-track development, manifesting in psychoanalytic discourse. His intra-subjective, inter-subjective and trans-subjective conceptualizations are metapsychologically rooted in the alterity of ‘the other’ subject, but also of the unconscious and primary process; and phenomenologically clinically observed, present and experienced. Writing on projective identification, transference and countertransference, Grotstein (2005) states: “…projective identification is the underlying common denominator in all transferences, whether one thinks of displacement of past object cathexes or the projective identifications of current mental representations. Analysands may attempt to project into the (image of the) analyst as an appeal or to influence, manipulate, seduce, corrupt, imitate or fuse with the analyst. When they do so, they unconsciously manipulate the image of the analyst within themselves and try to force the analyst by induction or priming (gesture) to conform to this image … countertransference is the obligatory counterpart to transference and includes the whole range of the analyst's repertoire of feelings and emotions in the analytic situation,

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