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and analyst and view the exploration of these reality interactions and their possible meanings (i.e. the processing of the projective identifications) as at the heart of the analytic process.
II. C. LATIN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS
M. Klein’s ideas had a great acceptance in Argentina in the 1950s and ‘60 and, from there, spread in Latin America where development continued. They were used in a creative way generating new points of view that enriched the original ideas of M. Klein and her followers. Contributions by Heinrich Racker (1910-1961), Willy and Madeleine Baranger, Leon Grinberg, Enrique Pichon Riviere, Arminda Aberastury, José Bleger, Angel Garma, Marie Langer, may be considered the main Latin American original contributions in the field of projective identification. As projective identification is often the only means for patients to communicate mental contents that are too painful to be articulated, the reception and understanding of the patient’s projections is a tool par excellence in working with difficult cases. The Argentine analyst Heinrich Racker, in his pivotal work on countertransference, described concordant and complementary identifications as intrinsic parts of the therapeutic relationship. In a concordant identification , the analyst uses aspects of him/herself to find a way to understand the paths and meanings of the patient’s internal conflicts, a process often referred to as empathy. Simultaneously, his/her trying to understand his unconscious complementary identifications will allow him/her to find out which internal object of the patient he/she is representing in the transference, in the hic et nunc of the analytic session, often one that has been disavowed and projected in the form of a projective identification. (Racker, 1953, 1957). Within this enlarged view, the countertransference as informed by projective identification becomes an indispensable tool by which the analyst is able to understand more of the patient’s object world. The analyst can then use that experience to help, in time, to process and return a modified form of the projection much like a mother does for her infant. Bion describes this process as helping the patient develop the capacity for alpha-function, i.e. thinking (see entry COUNTERTRANSFERENCE). For Racker, complementary identifications necessarily involved the patient’s activating aspects of the analyst’s unconscious. His Argentine colleague, Leon Grinberg (1956, 1979) developed the concept of “projective counter-identification” to describe clinical encounters with the aim of defining “… a number of disturbances introduced in the psychoanalytic technique on account of the excessive role played by projective identifications in the analysand, giving rise to a specific response in the analyst [...] whereby he is ‘led’ to perform, in an unconscious and passive way, the different roles assigned to him or her” (1956, p. 507). In one of his texts on this subject, Grinberg (1979) discussed the difference between Racker’s notion of complementary countertransference (Racker, 1953) and his own idea of
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