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III. B. Specific Developments in Europe
III. Ba. Intersubjectivity in Countertransference and Projective Identification A more specific relational trend is identifiable in the widening meaning that the concepts of countertransference and projective identification had acquired over many decades. Since Paula Heimann’s seminal paper (Heimann, 1950) countertransference was not anymore conceived solely as an obstacle to the analytic process due to the analyst’s unconscious conflicts but mainly as a tool for understanding the mental processes of the patient. As for projective identification, it was originally conceived as an aggressive action to rid oneself of unwanted experiences projected into an object in order to control it from inside (Klein 1946). Bion developed the concept of projective identification, emphasising its communicative quality. He makes a distinction between “normal” and “excessive” projective identification. “I shall suppose that there is a normal degree of projective identification… and that associated with introjective identification this is the foundation on which normal development rests”. (Bion, 1959/1967, p. 103). This benign circle of projective and introjective identifications can be disturbed, either by the mother’s inability to receive and understand the infant’s projective identifications or by the infant’s intolerance of frustration or envy. Both of these might lead to desperate, “excessive” projective identifications from the infant. (see separate entry CONTAINMENT: CONTAINER/CONTAINED). Subsequently it has been mainly used to refer to a particular clinical event of interpersonal type in which the patient expels and projects parts of the self into the analyst, in such a way as to induce him/her to participate in the projective process: it is precisely this feature - the analyst’s participation with his/her subjectivity - that is brought to the fore. In other words, while at the outset the concept of projective identification was conceived in a ‘one- person’ psychological framework, over time and progressively its meaning entered in a more ‘two person’ framework. This is the reason why this concept has gained a great success also outside the Kleinian milieu in which it originated. Very close to the post-Kleinian way of conceiving projective identification is the concept of role-responsiveness, formulated in 1976 by Joseph Sandler, a distinguished figure of the Anna Freudian Tradition (Malberg & Raphael-Leff, 2012), in order to highlight a kind of the analyst’s behaviour that can “[…] usefully be seen as a compromise between his own tendencies or propensities and the role-relationship which the patient is unconsciously seeking to establish” (Sandler 1976, p. 47). In addition to the broadening meaning acquired by countertransference and projective identification, the relational turn in European psychoanalysis has been influenced by North American relational psychoanalysis, where a combination of elements coming from Ego Psychology, Self Psychology and Interpersonalism has given rise to a number of schools of thought that were relational in nature with a variety of names such as ‘constructivism’, ‘intersubjectivism’, ‘postmodern perspective’ etc. At the crossroad of these conceptual as well
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