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Developmentally, the infant or infantile portion of the personality, under the strain of accumulating emotional distress, induces a symmetrical state in the vulnerable-because-willing mother so that the mother unconsciously surveys (self-activates) her own inventory of past actual or possible experiences within her conscious and unconscious self, selectively recruits the most pertinent of them, and then generates thoughts and/or actions to address the distress in the infant. The most significant clinical aspect of intersubjective projective transidentification is (unconscious) communication between two psychic realities . During the process of analysis, as in infant-mother transactions, the vectors of the transactions of projective transidentification operate bi-directionally , that is, the object instantly becomes a sender, and the originating projective sender thereupon becomes a receiver, that is, a dialogue is taking place. Grotstein stresses that such an unfolding dialogue (including the analyst’s thoughts and actions) prominently include interpretation of the analysand’s participation and the overall multiply layered exchange. In this context, Grotstein also addresses Ogden’s experiential intersubjective conceptualization of the ‘subjugating third’ of psychoanalysis, and posits his own metapsychological version of the preternatural unconscious presence of the “ ineffable subject of the unconscious ” (Grotstein, 2000 p. 19), a “ dramaturge ” (the creator-architect and director of the drama), or demon that is located only in the unconscious of the analysand, co-opts the subjectivities of the analysand and analyst to create a play in which the relevant unconscious theme is able to become enacted and thus known (Grotstein, 2000). Stephen Mitchell (1995), viewing projective identification from a relational/interpersonal approach, notes this process provides “a bridge between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal”. He emphasizes that such a viewpoint need take into account what actually occurs between patient and analyst and is thus fully constitutive of a two-person psychology. Tansey and Burke (1989) describe how projective identificatory processes may play an essential role in the development of empathy. While projective identification had been identified with Racker’s concordant identification and empathy with complementary identification (see below under Latin American contributions), they note that the reception of a projective identification can be an essential aspect of a truly empathic outcome when successfully processed by the receptor. In fact, they note that “an analyst’s achievement of empathic contact with the patient always involves some degree of projective identification from the patient.” (p. 63). These relational perspectives on projective identification emphasize the communicative aspects of projective identification and demonstrate that “enactments” in psychoanalysis can only be understood by examining projective identifications as they move back and forth between patient and analyst. Slavin and Kriegman (1998) understand enactments from the point of view of interpersonal conflict and negotiation, which they view as elemental and evolutionary. They conceptualize the intersubjective field as a place where the clash of identities of patient and analyst can serve to create the necessary conditions for a genuine renegotiation of the patient’s internal representations. If projective identification is viewed as an inevitable, normal aspect of communication that is necessarily bi-directional, involving both conscious and unconscious elements, the focus of study necessarily shifts from either the patient or the analyst to the field they co-constitute. The notion of a bi-personal field that is indivisible and includes both patient and analyst was proposed
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