Projective Identification


To act in that gap between." -- Robert Rauschenberg (Ashton, 1985, p. 234). By forcing a confrontation with derelict and despicable object fragments, these artists effectively countered a culture maniacally geared for new, and soon obsolete, products. Their strategies cunningly posed troubling questions about the nature of the art experience and mass culture that gave rise to such blatant violations of the traditional integrity of medium. (Hunter, 1985, p. 301)
 
 
 

Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  
 

Jung’s reading of the intersubjective process differed from Freud’s. As Sedgwick (1994) put it:

Jung means something different in his account of the transference and countertransference process than a reactive counter-transference to the patient’s transference however. He means the actual transferring, via the aforementioned unconscious "influence," of the patient’s illness "symptom" to the analyst. (p. 11) In 1946, Jung published the Psychology of the Transference, presenting a series of alchemical woodcuts, now the well-known Rosarium Philosophorum (Haeffner, 1991). Jung saw in this work the naive projection of the Alchemists in which all the components of unconscious identity, psychic infection, participation mystique, and the process he called feeling-into emerged symbolically. His description closely resembles current conceptions of projective-identification (Sedgwick, 1994, p. 11). Many of these were synonymous with what Melanie Klein presented in her paper, Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms, in the same year (Schwartz-Salant, 1989, p. 97). Klein proposed psychic processes not simply projected onto objects (as with transference) but placed into objects to control them from the inside out (Ogden, 1994). This was presumably the infant’s way of getting Mummy to respond to its needs. The idea represented the makings of a new locus for source material rising up from within the interactive field.

What Melanie Klein presented in 1946 was not a fully feathered theory of an interpersonal process. The original Kleinian idea of projective identification described a process occurring primarily in fantasy (not given a postmodern reading). Later formulations developed first with Paula Heimann who stressed the effect of Klein’s process on its recipient, then with Bion and Rosenfeld who codified the formal theory (Wharton, 1989). These theorists worked from the conclusion that intrapsychic content was actively placed inside the intrapsychic container of another. And yet, with my contention that projective identification emerged in response to the failure of the cartesian world view to grasp the ineffable nature of the psyche, I might suggest that this theory is just another refinement of Cartesian container space.

The idea of placing intrapsychic stuff into someone else’s intrapsychic container space is wonderfully Cartesian on the one hand, with its container space imagery, but it is also an awfully big pill for a scientific view based on, "nothing ever considered true unless it passes a set of rational hurdles with every problem being divided into as many parts as possible" (re: ‘The Inside and the Outside’). Where are the cogs and levers? How did this relate to chemistry or physics? It sounded more like metaphysics, than physics, which is verbieten in the hydraulic model of the psyche to which Freud adhered (Hampden-Turner, 1981). The added problem for Klein was that during the turn of the nineteenth-century anyone who disagreed with Sigmund Freud was in political hot water (and things have not changed much, by the way). This certainly was the case with Jung, once Freud’s predecessor, chosen to inherit the crown in psychoanalysis. Instead, the medical establishment ostracized him when he began formulating theories that did not agree with Freud’s (Ellenberger, 1970; McCall, 1983, p. 111). The rules of the game applied as well to Melanie Klein. The establishment dismissed her views as fantastic, while accepting as perfectly reasonable and commonplace Freud’s notions of castration complexes and Oedipal yearnings (Samuels, 1985). Klein in effect had discontinued her use of "scientific" procedure. She simply began telling stories about the inner life of children. To the medical establishment, she was guessing. And this was (and is) unacceptable.

It is no secret that Freud built his theories upon a distinctly biological, essentially mechanistic foundation. He worked under the direct guidance of the physiologist Ernst Brücke who held that, "No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism" (Wollman, 1984, p. 171-186). Freud insisted that, intuition was an illusion and that subjective interpretations by patients were not to be valued. We see, then, the clear elements of a Cartesian world view based on the dissociation of subject from object. Here also was the reason Freud viewed countertransference as dangerous. Surely, it interfered with reason! Freud clung throughout his lifetime to the belief that reason was necessary for making sense of life’s activities. As late as the 1930s Freud was still referring to pleasure as energy discharge, pain as energy buildup, cathexis as energy investment, and every significant human action as a species of energy exchange.

The issue then is not whether Freud was right or wrong about the ultimate reducibility of everything to some permutation of energy. As McCall (1983) pointed out:
 

What we have then [in Freud’s perspective] . . . is an energic or hydraulic model, a metaphorical extrapolation from Brückean physicalistic physiology, a paradigm imposed on the data of human action and interaction without a shred of evidence, psychological or other, being offered in its behalf. (p. 111) Freud’s alignment with the Enlightenment paradigm valuing reason and reductive logic endeared him to the budding medical establishment’s need for diagnostic/treatment categories. As with other nineteenth-century thinkers reflecting the Cartesian zeitgeist, reason for Freud meant facing facts and using the rational efforts of science (Rychlak, 1981). Though lacking in experimental foundations, psychoanalyst’s considered their discipline scientific in origin. They had absolute confidence that scientific developments would eventually provide appropriate explanations for their conclusions. For psychoanalysis, all psychic "malfunctions" could be reduced to an original cause (the marching song of all developmentalist psychologies). Standardized procedures, to say nothing of standardized fee-for-services, could be applied uniformly, successfully aligning one’s theoretical perspective with the needs of the marketplace.

Thus, the medical establishment empowered him with the ability to exclude those who disagreed with Freud. Though Melanie Klein’s intellectual and political lineage within the psychoanalytic community was apparently chaste, still:
 

[Her] work split the Psychoanalytic Society and eventually the international psychoanalytic community. Although she herself presented her work as a simple extension of Freud’s theories involving no fundamental innovations, she was denounced for distorting and betraying the basic principles of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The British Psychoanalytic Society is still split among a group loyal to Anna Freud, a group loyal to Klein, and yet another group, including D.W. Winnicott, who refused either side. (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983, p. 120) As to the theory of projective identification itself, even today not everyone buys into it (Wharton, 1989). For those who do, however, a whole new world of possibilities and problems comes into view. Christopher Bollas, echoing Neo-Freudians like Thomas Ogden and D.W. Winnicott, would later describe becoming "Situationally Ill" in response to his client, enabling him to enter directly into the world of the patient:  . . . each analyst working with, rather than against, the counter-transference must be prepared on occasion to become situationally ill . . . Indeed, in order to facilitate the analysand’s cure, the analyst will often have occasion to treat his own situational illness first . . . To be sure, in treating myself I am also attending to the patient, for my own disturbance in some way reflects the patient’s transference. (Bollas, 1987, p. 204) The presence Bollas felt, that calls the illness to the front line of analysis, is the absent presence at root in all unconsciousness. It is a mutual presence intimately known by both participants in dialogue. It speaks of places where one turns to another and is personally affected, personally addressed in one’s own vulnerabilities, not as a sensitive receiver but as one who meets directly and responds. To give voice and texture to this presence one must pursue it through the gap of dissociation, into the human act of response (Willeford, 1987).
 

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Michael Staples

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