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II. B. NORTH AMERICAN DEVELOPMENTS OF THE CONCEPT In the United States, Otto Kernberg (1987, p. 94), maintaining Klein’s view of projective identification as a pathological defense, describes it as a four-fold sequence where: (i) the projecting subject expels intolerable aspects of intrapsychic experience into a receptive object; (ii) subject maintains empathy with that which is projected; (iii) in a defensive move to control anxieties due to the expulsion, subject attempts to control the object; and (iv) subject induces in the object, what was once expelled into the object, through an actual interaction with the receptive object. Some analysts in North America, working from an interpersonal/relational perspective have come to view projective identification as a bi-directional process that is not merely a phantasy (Klein’s view) but involve real interaction between patient and analyst. Along these lines Ogden (1982), sees projective identification as a normal form of communication between patient and analyst that can be more or less pathological in nature depending on the nature of the mental contents extruded. He describes the process as follows: “The projector has the primarily unconscious fantasy of getting rid of an unwanted or endangered part of himself (including internal objects) and of depositing that part in another person in a powerfully controlling way. The projected part of the self is felt to be partially lost and to be inhabiting the other person. In association with this unconscious projective fantasy there is an interpersonal interaction by means of which the recipient is pressured to think, feel, and behave in a manner congruent with the ejected feelings and the self- and object-representations embodied in the projective fantasy.” (pp. 1-2) Clearly acknowledging the bi-directionality of projective identification, Ogden developed a concept of a patient and analyst co-creating an analytic third , which includes projective identifications both processed and unprocessed. Jessica Benjamin (2004) has further elaborated her version of an analytic third , unique to each analytic dyad and in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Grotstein is regarded in North America as bringing Bion’s communicative projective identification into the intersubjective realm. His formulation is rooted in Freud-Klein-Bion metapsychology of unconscious communication, with direct clinical implications. Regarding Bion’s concept of communicative projective identification as primary and inclusive of Klein’s earlier unconscious, omnipotent, intrapsychic mode, Grotstein (2005) postulates intersubjective “ projective transidentification” . Here, in building on the operation of an unconscious phantasy of omnipotent intrapsychic projective identification solely within the internal world of the projecting subject, Grotstein adds two other processes: 1. conscious and/or preconscious modes of sensorimotor induction , which would include signaling and/or evocation or prompting gestures (mental, physical, verbal, posturing or priming) on the part of the projecting subject; and, consequent, 2. spontaneous empathic simulation in the receptive object of the subject’s experience in which the receptive object is inherently ‘hard-wired’ (pre-wired) to be empathic with the prompting subject.
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