IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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by Sullivan (1953). Using field theory from social psychology, Sullivan insisted that an individual was always part of the social field that surrounds him. While he never used the concept of project identification per se , he clearly viewed the analytic process as a two-person field with each member having an effect on the other. Edgar Levenson (1972, 1995, 2017) has put forward a radical interpersonal view of the analytic interaction by insisting that the analytic couple is truly indivisible and that the central datum of a treatment is the structured interaction of its participants. He notes that in an analysis, “The cardinal question for the patient may not be ‘what does it mean?’ but ‘what is going on around here.” For Levenson any interaction consists of an infinite regress of messages and meta messages, both conscious and unconscious, such that ‘meaning’ in the conventional psychoanalytic sense is elusive. Maurice Apprey looked at the implications of projective identifications deriving from the mother’s conception of her baby in utero. In his work with at-risk mothers, Apprey (1987) suggested that maternal misconceptions of the baby in utero in the third trimester gave rise to fears of separation resulting in violent projective identifications which destroy the mother’s capacity to accommodate her conception of herself as a mother in her own right and her conception of her infant as a separate person. For these mothers the physical delivery of the baby can represent the loss of their own mothers, giving rise to massive regression resulting in post-natal depression or psychosis with confusion between self and object representations. These confusions can span three generations as terrified high-risk pregnant mothers may feel: “I am pregnant but I cannot tell my mother because she will kill me”; or, “it will kill her”. If the baby itself is used as a container of its mother’s violent projections, it can be seen as evil and become the container of its mother’s violence during post-natal depression or psychosis. Such a disturbed mother might come to believe that “the baby needs to be baptized”, that is, drowned in a bath-tub in order to “spare it and the world of evil.” Apprey proposes that psychoanalytic interventions, informed by an understanding of these transgenerational processes, can transform destructive projective identifications into empathic communication with her infant. Judith Mitrani (1993) delineated the ways that deficiencies in the containing object or in the capacity of the infant to use a containing object can precipitate a variety of pathological responses. Severe limitations in the mother’s capacity for reverie (possibly due to fears of being taken over, being penetrated, absorption, injury) can result in unmodified dreads being returned to the baby. This rejection of the baby’s distress can lead to massive projections of parts of her helpless infant-self in a frantic search for a containing object and curtail the development of a mind for thinking about and modifying experience. Sensory experience that is denied access to a maternal psychic apparatus fails to be transformed into food for thought and remains fit only for evacuation. Similarly, limitations in the mother’s alpha-function (perhaps due to the mother’s inability to tolerate the infant’s and/or her own pain, fears of death and destruction, and/or an inability to mentalize painful, primitive dread) may result in the infant’s reintrojecting not only its own unmodified fears, but his mother’s fears as well. Worse yet, if the required alpha-function is not only absent but is actually reversed, in the case of an object which unthinks, misunderstands,

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