An attempt to reduce art to a science, Seurat’s presents the strictest kind of order, everything is in the right place. Color has been reduced to a set of fundamental laws. "Every brush stroke has become a precise little dot of pure color, a tiny, impersonal ‘building block’ in the construction of the picture" (Janson, 1984, p. 141). .
 

[Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  The questions at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have read the primary reading  for  Continuing Education Credits. There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.]

Projective identification, transference, and countertransference all model variations of intrapsychicprojection. The idea is that "contents" arising from within you may find their way onto me. Perhaps you feel angry with me when your anger’s true home lies buried in your connection with someone else. Your anger, perhaps denied and split off, weaves round a surrogate image.

Transference creates an "as-if" experience. The client feels "as if" the analyst were the source of his projections. Those highly polarized feelings lodged within the unconscious somehow find a way around their ego’s ability to deny them expression. They transferred themselves to a safer alternative. It could be a person (‘I hate that guy . . . .  I don't know why, I just hate him!’), it could be the family car (‘This lemon never starts when I really want it to!’). Transference is an equal opportunity employer.

The fantasy of countertransference reciprocates this process. I experience my reactions to your projections onto me, rising up from within my deeply intrapsychic vulnerabilities, and I project these onto you. My response to your anger triggers some unconscious experience. I react, I defend . . . .  I attach my reaction to you. "You hate me!" "You resist me!" "You are picking on me." "There must be something wrong with you!"

Projective identification complicates these diagrams, suggesting one can literally place the intrapsychic content of one person inside another. "Quite often," writes Mario Jacoby (1984), "feelings, emotions, thoughts or intuitions pop up in me which are in the patient’s mind and which he may express at that very moment. I am always amazed at these synchronistic or ‘quasi-telepathic’ incidents" (p. 39). And again, this time from Michael Fordham; ". . . . [through] aspects of the patient’s psyche that pass unconsciously from the patient to the analyst, the analyst . . . .  is able to identify and experience the patient’s psychic contents" (p. 38), and again from Nathan Schwartz-Salant (1982), ". . . . there is no doubt that ‘psychic infection’ is real; what is going on in one person can immigrate into another. This is an unconscious process that must be realized and dealt with" (p. 131).

This is a rarely questioned script in psychodynamic psychologies, but does not address the practical question of how one is supposed to distinguish between something inside another versus something inside oneself being projected onto another. If I am angry with you, for instance, am I experiencing something originating in you, or originating in me? What magical device allows me to differentiate what Jacoby describes as "my ability to identify and experience the patient’s psychic contents" (Jacoby, 1984, p. 38), as opposed to experiencing something originating from within me as an unconscious response to you?

One might see here an elegant cartesian dilemma saturated with its edict to classify and categorize. The methodology resulting assumes that through personal therapy the analyst can come to know himself well enough to ascertain the difference between his own intrapsychic content and the intrapsychic content of another. But in the end, the premise will be that "I just know," and one should scrutinize "I just know," even while admiring its heuristic merit. We might do this without denying the reality of the experience. Scrutiny here lies not with the validity of the experience, but with the claims of a scientifically verifiable technology that can adequately identify, differentiate, and catalog enough of one’s own unconscious content to accurately distinguish it from all other content. This would be difficult at best if for no other reason than such content is by definition unconscious--which means precisely that it is not at the disposal of the ego.

The cartesian engine assumes the need for an ideal observer. This observer declares that the truth of the situation must be seen from above, from an objective point of view removed from fused enmeshments. So the first step in the technology of a cartesian transference is to identify the components of the situation one needs to get above. This was the classical Freudian position, situated in a point of objective observation outside the tumult of the patient’s madness. From here, Freud evidently though, one could see whatever the shadowy shape really was. This approach is still very much alive in modern psychology, not only in Freudian camps but in all approaches advocating the need for objectivity, distancing, and "professionalism."

One might note that as long as we venture no further than simple compartmentalized models of transference and countertransference, we remain on relatively high ground. It isn’t until we begin to dabble with projective identification that the cartesian boat begins to leak. Take a situation, for example, in which I harbor an especially caustic inner response to people appearing to be weak or victimized, and you have an especially caustic inner response to people in authority. If I feel a strong inner response to you who seem weak and victimized to me, as long as we divvy up the supposedly intrapsychic mechanisms into only yours (transference) and only mine (countertransference) there is no particular problem that manifests. But when the notion that you can somehow place your intrapsychic content into me, and I then experience these contents as being mine, comes to the fore, the boat begins to sink. How can I be sure that I am identifying that which I am experiencing as truly mine or truly yours? How do I differentiate what comes from me, from aspects of you that pass unconsciously over into me? Mario Jacoby notes the problem when he asks, ". . . . is it projection or perception" (Jacoby, 1984, p. 41)?
 

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Michael Staples