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When psychotic mechanisms tied to a primal psychic catastrophe and to the most archaic part of the psyche are involved in the analysis, the projection planes are multiplied and the attacks against the alpha function – if not against the whole of the psychic apparatus warranting the contact with internal and external reality – generate such confusions and distortions that this linear model is revealed as irrelevant to the clinical material. Bion introduces the notion of “projective transformations” to account for these forms of transference marked by states of confusion, undifferentiation, and even derealisation. In such forms splitting and destructiveness directed at psychic contents and containers prevail; arrogance replaces the search for truth; and bizarre objects, reduced to their concrete dimension, including fragments of the Ego, Superego and non-transformed beta elements, refer to the pathological projective identification and the attacks on linking. In his later writings, Bion reminds us that any theorisation, including the theorisation of the transference, is a response to the fear of the unknown and involves the risk of crippling creativity and psychic growth. Bion returns to the etymology of the term transference which suggests a passage, a transitory element in the history of the analytic encounter (Bion 2005a, p. 5). The analyst’s interpretations “hide [his] nakedness” (Bion 2005b, p. 42); the transferential relationship as well as the analyst’s position should be elucidated so that we may be released from it. IV. E. Late Bionian development in USA An example of a late Bionian tradition in North America, particularly applicable to analysis with children and primitive mental states, is Mitrani’s concept ‘taking’ the transference. (1999, 2000, 2001, 2014). She conceives this as a function of the analyst essential to what Bion called the maternal function of reverie: that attentive, actively receptive, introjective and experiencing aspect of the containing object. This function does not merely entail a cognitive understanding of or an ‘empathic attunement’ with what the patient is feeling toward and experiencing with the analyst in any given moment. It also refers to the unconscious introjection, by the analyst, of certain aspects of the patient’s inner world, and a resonance with those elements of the analyst’s own inner world, such that she is able to feel herself to actually be that unwanted part of the patient’s self or that unbearable object that she has previously been introjectively identified with. Taking the transference may be the most difficult aspect of the work, as it is not a matter of good will or good training, but an unconscious act governed by unconscious factors.
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