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doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12217
Burial and resurgence of projective identification in French psychoanalysis €cher1 Daniel Widlo 9 rue Edouard Jacques, 75014 Paris, France – [email protected] (Accepted for publication 11 March 2014)
Curiously enough, the concept of projective identification was ignored, and even rejected in France for at least two decades after the publication of the founding texts of Melanie Klein and Herbert Rosenfeld. This rejection was due to a critique from child psychoanalysts close to Anna Freud and also from the teaching of Lacan: the first took the real mother–child relation extensively into account, while the latter only saw the internal object as a signifier. The fact that during this period the countertransference was a concept reduced to its negative content no doubt explains this deliberate ignorance. With the dissemination of a broader and more positive conception of the countertransference, a renewal of interest could be observed in the 1980s with references to empathic listening and to the effects of thought-induction. Keywords: countertransference, co-thinking, projective identification, projection
empathy,
primary
identification,
It is easier to observe and to understand how a new psychoanalytic concept was recognized or discussed in its time by psychoanalysts than to show how and why, for a time at least, such an innovation was shrouded in silence (Roazen, 2002). The attitude of French psychoanalysts towards the ‘Kleinian’ concept of projective identification is a good example of this. For at least two decades, if not three, no sooner was the term cited than its usage was contested and swiftly discarded. Today, the concept is readily used, admittedly in a variety of senses, as is the case elsewhere, but recognized at least by the younger generations. Recently, a ‘survey’ involving 30 or so ‘young’ psychoanalysts (trained over the last 15 years) showed me that all of them used this concept, or at least recognized the legitimacy of employing it, though without necessarily feeling confident about the use they were making of it! Now, even today, if I question my contemporaries or colleagues who were trained during the 1960s or 1970s, most of them recognize that it is a concept that they do not use. I have compared these testimonies with my own memories. When I was doing my training, my friends and I used to read the writings of Melanie Klein in English. Those that referred to the existence of a paranoid–schizoid phase had seemed enigmatic to us, so we put them aside; and, within this context, projective identification, an archaic process of introjection and projection, seemed far removed from our practice of psychoanalysis and from 1
Translated by Andrew Weller.
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what we understood of the young child. Such were our prejudices. The very term seemed strange. Transposed into French, literally, ‘projective identification’ became, incorrectly, ‘l’identification projective’; in short, it referred to the projective value of a form of identification and not the contrary. What sort of projection was involved? Was it to be distinguished from the Freudian concept? If the reference to a form of internalization was justified, the reference to an effect of projection remained obscure. Recently, during a discussion with Jean Laplanche, I asked him again what he felt about the use of this concept. He replied abruptly that it was a concept he did not use. Andre Green (2004), in a debate led by M. Bergmann (2004), gave a more nuanced and ambiguous response in connection with Glenn Gabbard’s article on the relations between the concepts of countertransference and projective identification. Waging war on the concept of ‘enactment’,2 he denounced Gabbard’s ‘acrobatic’ attempt to see this concept as the sign of newly emerging ‘common ground’. He pointed out that what counted for him was the distance between the individual theoretical positions, the different schools, and added that “projective identification is a purely Kleinian concept, to be recognized as such; closely related but distinct” (“She is my cousin”) (Green, 2004, p. 344)!
A concept that was initially ignored in France I will now set aside these personal memories and subjective impressions, even though it is difficult to describe the absence of the use of a concept by its mere absence or by the absence of any reference to the process that it is supposed to describe. Let us consider, first of all, the vocabularies and dictionaries. In 1967, J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis integrated it into their Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse [Language of Psychoanalysis, 1973], which was none the less resolutely limited to the language of Freud. They explain that it was a term introduced by M. Klein relating to phantasies in which the subject introduces his own person (his ‘self’) in totality or in part into the interior of the object in order to harm, possess and control it. But this phantasy closely bound up with M. Klein’s paranoid–schizoid position appears to them to be a mode of projection: “If Klein speaks of identification here it is because it is the subject’s self that is projected” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 356). And they conclude that the Kleinian usage of the expression ‘projective identification’ is consistent with the narrow sense to which psycho-analysis tends to confine the term ‘projection’, namely, the ejection into the outside world of something which the subject refuses in himself – the projection of what is ‘bad’. Just from reading these lines one is inclined to see here a simple form of identification in which the other is assimilated with the subject. There is no indication as to whether this ‘phantasy’ belongs to an early phase of development and/or to projective and identificatory movements in the adult: the conclusion (scarcely veiled) is that there is no need for this concept! 2
Translator’s note: In English in the original.
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Let it be noted right away that this would be not the case in the dictionaries that were published 30 years or so later, whether the one by E. Roudinesco and M. Plon (1997) or A. de Mijolla’s (2002) Dictionnaire in which Hinshelwood gives a very complete presentation of the history of the concept (p. 781). The only exception is the Dictionnaire freudien by C. Le Guen (2008) which, as it is devoted exclusively to the language of Freud, continues to omit it. Before exploring any further the rejection of the concept in the 1950s and 1960s, it may well be useful to look more closely at the climate in which psychoanalysis was developing in France at this time. Not long after the rebirth of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society (SPP) in 1945–46, following the dispersal, the persecutions, and the isolation of the years of occupation, a conflict erupted that would lead to a split in 1963. Beyond the institutional conflict, the debate was to become increasingly lively between a movement of thought that remained very attached to the Viennese school through the current of Ego-psychology, the theory of object-relations, studies on the direct observation and development of the child, marked by the school of Anna Freud and the work of Rene Spitz, and, another movement of thought, strongly influenced by that of Jacques Lacan, marked by the importance attached to language in the practice of analysis, to the relationship with the Other, in which the subject’s desire was held to have its source. Now we shall see that for very different reasons the two movements would each, in their own way, distance themselves from Kleinian thought and the importance that it attaches to projective identification. Beyond the equivocal nature of the term, it was the early relationship to the other that was in question. For the classical movement derived from Ego-psychology and Anna Freud’s psychoanalysis of child development, early development cannot ignore the interpersonal relationship between mother and child. In France, it was principally paediatricians who became child psychoanalysts; they were sensitive to this perspective of the actual mother–child relationship, as well to the contributions of Rene Spitz and John Bowlby. As V. Smirnoff (1966) has clearly pointed out: The fundamental reproach that these geneticist analysts [Ajuriaguerra et al., 1955; Lebovici and Diatkine, 1954] make of Klein’s work rests on her very conception of the object relation. While Melanie Klein believes psychic structuring already exists in the first months of life, leading to a separation between good and bad objects, irrespective of the nature of the object itself, the geneticists consider that structuring activity is secondary to the establishment of object-relations, a process they seek to elaborate.
Indeed, as early as 1952, in a work that claimed to be the manifesto of a fundamentally Freudian psychoanalysis, Lebovici and Diatkine (1954) had expressed very serious doubts about Kleinian points of view, taking up the critiques put forward by Glover (1956, p. 181). From one text to the other, the same argument is used again. If with regard to the theory of object-relations at least, it is clear why the concept of projective identification was given a poor reception, if not explicitly rejected, the term was not even cited by the Lacanian school which was Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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establishing itself at the time and represented more than a third of the candidates in training. It was not that Lacan was not sensitive to certain illuminating contributions of Kleinian ideas, but he saw them as openings akin to his own ideas! The ambiguity concerning the notion of the fantasy object did not bother him especially, provided that it was given the meaning he attached to it, that is to say of a signifier inserted into the field of speech: . . .language allows him [the subject] to regard himself as the stagehand, or even the director, of the entire imaginary capture of which he would otherwise be nothing more than the living marionette. Fantasy is the very illustration of this original possibility. This is why any temptation to reduce fantasy to imagination . . . is a permanent misconception, a misconception from which the Kleinian school, which has certainly carried things very far here, is not free, having failed to even glimpse the category of the signifier. (Lacan, 2006, p. 532)
The fact that this entire archaic configuration is sketched out without any reference to the real object of the drive and to the real presence of the mother is not the problem for Lacan: “The dialectic of fantasy objects promoted in practice by Melanie Klein tends to be translated in the theory in terms of identification” (ibid., p. 513). Archaic introjections and projections take place for him within a primary symbolic relationship with the other; not within a relationship of mothering, but within the imaginary relation with the other, in relation to the mirror stage. A child’s play is not for him ‘fantasmagorie’. In no way is it imaginary fascination for the object of the drive but a symbolic expression of the relation to the Other. In short, the Kleinian theory of introjection–projection (this is how he insists on referring to projective identification) is not rejected by Lacan but regarded as a precursor of his own theory. The relation to the Other is certainly a relation to desire, but with a big D, situated within a primary ontology of access to language: By showing us the primordial nature of the “depressive position”, the extremely archaic subjectivization of a kakon, Melanie Klein pushes back the limits within which we can see the subjective function of identification at work, and she especially enables us to situate the first superego formation as extremely early. (ibid., p. 94)
We can say that for Lacan the mother is held at a distance from primary fantasy, but for a different reason than the one given by the ‘geneticists’ of object-relations. The reason invoked is the symbolic order constitutive of the subject and not the ‘instinctual cooking’ which Lacan amusingly denounces in Melanie Klein’s work. This position was one to which many analysts would remain faithful, even those outside the Lacanian schools, as can be seen from R. Dorey’s intervention in the general discussion related in Projection, Identification, Projective Identification (Sandler, 1987): “In projective identification we have the enactment of an imaginary fantasy relationship, but if a change occurs . . . we witness the transition from this Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
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imaginary relationship to a more symbolic capacity for entering into relationships” (p. 134, my translation). Although the French controversies of the 1950s and 1960s partially lifted the reservations towards the Kleinian concept shared by the different schools, mention should be made of the influence of the ideas and clinical practice of D. W. Winnicott which aroused sharp interest in child psychoanalysts from both groups. But the common references to Winnicott found a point of agreement in the relative lack of interest that he accorded to the Kleinian concept: He was influenced by Klein’s ideas of unconscious fantasy, projective and introjective identification, but he rebelled against the constraints of subscribing rigidly to those views and becoming a formal member of her group. It seemed to him that the Kleinians valued the child’s phantasy to the detriment of understanding the whole world of the psychosomatic partnership of the mother and infant, while to the Kleinians he seemed too involved in physical aspects, child-rearing realities and gratifying activities. (Scharff, 2004, p. 184)
Winnicott’s critical remarks of the Kleinian concept were so rare that I omitted to mention its existence when he asked me to present his book, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, in the International Journal (Widl€ ocher, 1970).
Some positive or critical contributions announcing a renewal of interest We can say, then, that over a period of nearly 30 years, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the concept of projective identification was considered in France as a point of curiosity specific to the particularities of Kleinian theory. So there is nothing surprising in the fact that the concept was taken up, albeit rarely, in the writings of the small number of analysts who belonged to this movement. The latter, moreover, were more influenced by the contributions of H. Rosenfeld and by the importance he attached to psychotic states of mind in the process of projective identification within a certain British current of thought (see Aguayo, 2009; Steiner, 2009). Mention should be made here of the contributions by Begoin and Begoin Guignard (1982), Begoin (1984), Fain and Begoin Guignard (1984), and Houzel (1991). In these relatively late publications (note that these publications in French by ‘Kleinian’ authors date back to the 1980s!), the French authors claiming allegiance to Melanie Klein present their contribution, moreover, with modesty: “Some members of the French psychoanalytic schools are ready to accept the concept of projective identification, but they propose to translate this term by ‘identificatory projection’, which gives a better rendering of the process that has been well described by M. Klein and her successors, notably H. Segal and H. Rosenfeld”. These publications referred not only to the first contributions of Klein and her students but also to the contributions of Bion and his school (see Begoin Guignard, 1991). Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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So we can see how, after the firm condemnations of the 1950s and 1960s, ignorance or neglect of the concept were countered by the development of a Kleinian current of thought. Mention should also be made here of the contributions – independent of the conflicts between schools, and nourished by solid theoretical experience – of two ‘independent’ researchers J. Laplanche and P. Aulagnier, and of two child psychoanalysts, G. Haag and D. Houzel, who were able to make use of the concept for understanding infantile autism. Laplanche (1987) returns to the question of the status of archaic representation. Is fantasy, and thus that of ‘interiorization–projection’ of the order of fiction (the Lacanian ‘imaginary’ realm) or of the order of an original mental experience? He writes: Klein’s objects’, those famous ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects (whole or part), which fight amongst themselves within the subject, are not, in any sense, subjective ways of aiming at a real object. It is not simply my way of seeing reality, even if my vision is distorted by my fears or by my impulses. This is where I speak of ‘scandal’ since these objects are real objects for M. Klein, objects which, from this period of introjection onwards, lead their own life within the subject and provoke real, quasimechanical effects there, in particular, of aggression and excitement. The couple introjection/projected is thus substituted for – or is opposed to – the couple real/fictive. (Laplanche, 1987, p. 111)
Rather than dismissing the usefulness of this concept, I think that Laplanche was showing how he gave it meaning. What is primary, then, is the real external primary scene of attack or of linking, which becomes a real object, hallucinated, internal, ‘auto’. In an article published in 1990, A. Fine observed, at a time when the concept was resurfacing in France, that: “The mechanism of projective identification does not appear much in the theorization of Piera Aulagnier” (1990, p. 232). But he goes on to point out that in her work she apprehends the different identifications through the identificatory project of the ‘I’ (je) of the infans–child, whose difficulties of reaching ‘identificatory compromises’ and even the ‘major identificatory conflict in certain cases between the identifying ‘I’ (Je) and the identified I (je), culminating in a potential for psychosis, she explores throughout her work. With regard to later stages of development, she posits an ‘identificatory Space’ with multiple and composite entry points, a veritable ‘relational matrix’. Does this not bring us back once again, albeit in a different way, as with Laplanche, to the Kleinian way of thinking, though more here from a transferential than an ontogenetic point of view?
From projective identification to countertransference We can see, then, how, after the categorical rejections of the 1950s and 1960s, a more comprehensive approach to the concept was arrived at. As we have just seen, this was a result of the contributions both of authors of Kleinian inspiration and of more critical authors inspired by certain Lacanian points of view. But a more general phenomenon should be stressed Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
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here, which, in my view, played a decisive role here in the recognition of the concept of projective identification, namely, the emphasis placed on the countertransference as a process of critical listening to the unconscious. In parallel to the remarks I have made so far and the emphasis I have placed on the question of the silence of French psychoanalysis with regard to projective identification, we can now consider the further question of the silence of French psychoanalysis in respect of the countertransference. F. Duparc (2001) has published a very well-documented historical study on this theme. He emphasizes Lacan’s influence on this relative neglect: “For him silence was not a frustration but a manifestation of the psychoanalyst’s presence, of his participation in a non-verbal relationship. . .”. And he adds: “This attitude no doubt has to do with the brevity of Lacan’s own analysis and his difficulty, for which there is substantial evidence, in tolerating more than a modicum of transference from his patients – a trait incidentally that he shared with Sacha Nacht” (Duparc, 2001, p. 153). In a more recent study (Widl€ ocher, 2011), I have tried to show that in general this reserve stemmed more from a negative conception of the countertransference as resistance, which had its origin already in the early developments of psychoanalysis in France before the World War II. At the outset, countertransference was seen as a phenomenon which stands in the way of objective listening to the operations of the mind during the treatment, in particular, those that concern the processes of repetition and displacement linked to the transference. I shall only cite here the references that are made to it in the correspondence with Jung in connection with the ‘Spielrein’ affair, and later on in the technical writings and the correspondence with Ferenczi. All these warnings against the negative effects of the countertransference were well known – through the writings of Freud and his pupils – by the pre-war training analysts and by their pupils in the rebirth of psychoanalysis in France in 1945–1946. Through our reading and through what was transmitted to us by our teachers, we learnt how much the countertransference can lead us into making technical errors and misrecognitions while listening to the patient. A didactic analysis was the necessary instrument for avoiding this stumbling-block. From this point of view, there was no discordance between our teachers. Nacht, Lacan or Lagache seemed to share the same point of view on this subject. This principle applied to the issue of neutrality which marked the quality of the listening, and we found it again in the distant reception reserved for candidates, in the attitude of suspicion that was aroused, in the supervised analyses, by our feeble attempts at interpretation. It took me some time to understand the influence Loewenstein brought to bear on this subject. We know he was the analyst of the ‘three’ masters. In the USA, I subsequently learnt that he was renowned for his very ‘silent’ practice. From reading his work, which reflects his teaching activities in Paris from 1926–1929, one understands, moreover, the extent to which he considered these precautions as marks of tact and necessary reserve. As an example of this legitimate concern to make candidates wary of wild interpretations and hasty interventions, Loewenstein draws on the model of the analyst as a catalysing agent and stresses the risks of giving way to Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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misplaced therapeutic zeal. Above all, he writes: “What seems particularly important to me is that the analyst should always be very aware of the latent meaning, of the significance, of what he says”. This is reminiscent of Freud’s teaching according to which the ‘ideal analysis’ is one in which the psychoanalyst’s role is confined to that of a sort of catalyser which allows the analytic process to unfold by virtue of interpretations. The view that the countertransference was an obstacle to the neutrality of the objectivity of analytic listening was shared, moreover, outside France. In Great Britain, Melanie Klein and her students followed the guidelines of the Berlin Institute and the teaching of Eitingon and Sachs. In the USA, the arrival of Europeans from Berlin and Vienna rectified the deviations of Sullivan and Karen Horney, inspired by Ferenczi and an interpersonal approach. However, the 1970s were marked by quite a radical challenge to this practice. The significant lengthening of didactic analyses played a role in this. In France, Nacht called into question the indifference (which we have translated as neutrality) of the psychoanalyst, and we know how swift Lacan was to make ironical remarks about the psychoanalyst’s ‘goodness’. People began to read Ferenczi with more interest than Abraham. But it was principally in London that parallel currents emerged which attached importance to the analyst’s affective involvement for understanding the treatment process and thus for handling interpretative listening. On the Kleinian side, the interest in projective identification brought up the question of neutrality again. Was it not important to take into account the effects of projection on the analyst’s listening? Paula Heimann, who was reticent about projective identification, precisely because she could not conceive of its effects without deep involvement and self-critical listening on the analyst’s part, wrote her sensational article on the countertransference in 1949. But she had already shown, by defending Kleinian views on the effects of projection as early as 1939, in particular with regard to objectrelations how the analyst’s psychic reality was affected by the patient’s fantasies. I would like to mention the fact that during the 1970s and 1980s, a large number of Franco-British meetings took place involving clinical exchanges during which 40 or so participants had the opportunity to examine their respective practices. I recall in particular a meeting in Le Touquet, in 1975, during which I was surprised by the vigorous nature of the controversy between H. Segal and P. Heimann, two colleagues whose writings we were familiar with and with whom we had frequent personal contact, especially since P. Heimann had actively participated in the creation of my Association, the French Psychoanalytic Association (APF). On that day she was able to show our French group the extent to which the concept of projective identification had the weakness of neglecting the question of the transmission of the patient’s fantasy in the analyst’s experience of the transference. The key for the operative value of the countertransference resides for P. Heimann in the internalization of the other’s thought processes, the effects of which must be identified: Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
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When the analyst moves away from his patient, he carries out a piece of self-analysis on the spot, which later becomes the source of a fuller self-exploration outside the analytic situation. It is this quick self-analysis that enables the analyst to return to his patient, freed from the disturbances in his cognitive process and with his ‘work ego’ in good functioning order. (Paula Heimann, personal communication)
This ‘on the spot’ self-analysis might be characterized as a reactivation of the training analysis with its dual effects of treatment and learning – a necessary condition for ‘making’ a psychoanalyst.
From projective identification to empathy It was by taking into account this process of the transmission of the patient’s thought processes to those of the analyst that the ‘into’ effect of projective identification could be understood in addition to the ‘onto’ effect of fantasy. For, in order to understand how the effect of countertransference is to be distinguished from a simple projection, it is necessary to place the term identification after that of projection. Some French authors have sought, moreover, to promote the term ‘identificatory projection’ as a translation for ‘projective identification’. But this term is no more exact. True, the identification is directed towards a projected representation (the projection of the rejected internal object, the ‘onto’), but it takes possession of the other and we may well ask ourselves if this other is what the subject’s thought makes him be? This is what Sandler (1976) was to propose under the term of role responsiveness. More generally, though, should we not come back here to the concept of empathy, but in a different sense to Kohut’s use of it? I would like to put forward the idea here that empathy does not necessarily relate to a global representation of the ‘self’ of the other as is suggested by the current of self-psychology and those of intersubjectivity. Another way of seeing things consists in applying empathy not to a global representation of the self but to isolated representations, to psychic acts which are expressed in sequential scenes in associative mental activity (fantasies, memories, etc.). The empathic movement in analysis must thus be dissected, decomposed, if it is to acquire meaning. It is interesting to note, from a clinical point of view, that if the empathic movements accompanying associative listening derive their richness from the multiplicity of these inferential systems, it is expected that an interpretation that is communicated verbally to the analysand will be received by the latter as a result of a proximity of thought, and thus of an effect of empathy between the therapist and his patient. Inevitably, the analyst’s associative processes stray or deviate from the patient’s. This deviation can be expressed by false inferences, by errors of empathy which I have proposed to call movements of ‘n eguempathie’. The analyst may become somewhat distanced from the listening process; some distraction may direct his associative activity away from the session; his mind may become preoccupied by theoretical constructions or moments of self-analysis, or his attention may become focused on the words or, conversely, the movements, the gestures, Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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or intonations of the patient. If interpretation must be empathic to be heard, its sources are thus multiple. A tuning of the associative activities of the therapist and patient that is too continuous would amount to a form of collusion, or even a ‘shared delusion’. It is clear that this interplay of co-associativity is greatly enlivened by the effects of transference and countertransference in – let me emphasize – both protagonists. With reference to telepathy, Freud had already pointed out that analysis teaches us that what has been communicated by this means of induction from one person to another is not merely a chance piece of indifferent knowledge. It shows that an extraordinarily powerful wish harboured by one person and standing in a special relation to his consciousness has succeeded, with the help of a second person, in finding conscious expression. . . (1921, pp. 184–5)
It is obvious that the mental operations and the instinctual drives that animate them are indissoluble; moreover, this finds expression in the identificatory movements of rapprochement and distancing. Introjection and projection have their role to play here in the identificatory processes which result from this mental or psychical work. In the processes of thought-transference and empathy, the effects involved are undoubtedly linked to instinctual drive movements. There are two distinct levels: one is the process whereby the drives seek objects/aims, whether in an interpersonal relationship or in fantasy; the other is the way in which fantasies are expressed in representations or in acting out. It is in order to avoid the ambiguities of the term intersubjectivity that I have proposed the notion of ‘co-thinking’ to describe the effects of the associative process of the analysand’s representations on those of the analyst. The term co-thinking [co-pens ee] does not designate some new artifice, but aims to describe a process of reciprocal development of associative activity. The words (acts of thought expressed through speech) and what is signified between them, their associations, the words omitted or censored, etc., expressed through the speech of one of them enter the thought of the other, thereby becoming his own objects of thought. The effects of meaning that they produce depend both on the associative context from which they come and on that which they create in the other. Co-thinking may be considered as a vehicle of communication from one unconscious to another. From a dynamic point of view, the transfero-countertransferential interplay is part of the content and the associative dynamics of co-thinking. Thought-induction and the process of co-thinking that it creates differ radically from other modes of expression of the transfero-countertransferential relationship. Here the analyst and patient relate to each other through a fusional process, a primary identification, whereas other modes of expression allow for the enactment of an interpersonal scene that is imagined or accomplished materially in the context of the session. The associative flow of the analyst’s thinking is created by elements coming from the patient Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
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even though the latter is not directly aware of communicating them to the analyst. Our own thoughts are very often induced by what we hear, without the patient realizing it, for instance, details concerning a person or a situation in the outside world which we are also aware of. These effects of involuntary induction can easily result, moreover, in negative effects. The empathic movement in analysis must therefore be dissected and decomposed if it is to acquire meaning. It is somewhat surprising to arrive at the idea that the psychoanalytic unconscious is the unknown linking up the representations that are formed in the flow of associations rather than the representations themselves. On this view, what gives meaning to the unconscious psychic act is not the utterance, but the links between the utterances. The unconscious proper is composed along the lines of dreams: The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium. (Freud, 1900, p. 525)
The role of the ego is to extract a secondary psychic function from the network. From the mycelium, which is simply a web of relations, it must sift out a train of thought whose origins are to be sought in the tangle of the associative interactions which characterize the primary functioning of the unconscious. This point of view is closely akin to that of Bion and his notion of beta elements, elementary sensory impressions which must be transformed into constructed formations (alpha function) bearing a meaning that is capable of being expressed as such. Bion seems here to follow the psychological model in which sensations and perception are opposed. I simply wish to posit that the psychoanalytic unconscious in its ‘depth’ might depend more on the links between representations than on the representations themselves. From this point of view, only their associative connectivity, dominated by charges of affects, confers meaning on them. The setting has often been considered as a therapeutic agent in itself. The influence exerted by the objectivist school of ego-psychology on the developments of psychoanalysis in France after the war attests to this. If one considers the setting as a context that is necessary for the application of the fundamental rules, as I propose to do, it can be seen that it derives its therapeutic value, first and foremost, from the meaning that it constructs between the two participants, and that interpretation can be considered as the expression of this common work. Interpretation must be understood as a direct effect of co-thinking. The associative networks produced in the psychoanalyst must be understood as the expression of the analysand’s psychic reality. Insofar as elements that are absent from the preconscious associative network are at work, the analyst’s psychic work allows him to identify the analysand’s unconscious representations or associations. Hypothetical representations and latent Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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interpretations are thereby formed which may then come to the analyst’s mind at a suitable moment and be communicated to the analysand, opening up a new path to his associative networks. Co-thinking creates a repertoire of potential interpretations, of ‘key representations’, which are capable of ‘unlocking’ a preconscious system resisting the pressures of the unconscious (the small portion of the id of which Freud speaks in Analysis terminable and interminable). This interest for the concept of empathy clearly has parallels in American currents following Ferenczi which are still very active (Lothane, 1994; Wyman and Rittenberg, 1992), but it was widely taken up again in the 1980s (Buie, 1981) and gave rise to numerous publications (see Widl€ ocher, 2004).
Conclusion M. Aisenstein has recently established a connection between a critical conception of the countertransference and Lacan’s disregard for projective identification (Aisenstein, 2011, in Guyomard et al., 2011, p. 78): “I think I have a better understanding today of the ‘reproach’ Lacan makes of the countertransference when he writes: ‘We need to be wary of this inappropriate term’. It is true that there is as much reason to deplore the silence which surrounded the concept up until the 1950s as the fashionable effect that surrounded it thereafter.” But she adds: “I mean that projective identification, in my view, is part of the conceptions of countertransference as much in Marty and Green, which explains why French psychoanalysis has had little recourse to this concept.” Does this mean that the concept of countertransference would have sufficed for the French? But it is precisely when one takes the countertransference seriously that one speaks of projective identification. Basically, if, initially, French psychoanalysts gave the concept a cool reception, it was not only because of the ambiguity of the term when translated word for word into French but also because of the multiple clinical and theoretical references to which it could be attached. Admittedly, the resistances to its usage lay in sources which nourished French psychoanalysis, but it has to be said that the French did not obtain the clarifications they were seeking from their English-speaking colleagues and friends. Today, the French seem resigned to considering the concept as belonging to a complex theoretical and clinical field and to making use of it in a variety of contexts. There is general agreement (Gibeault, 2011) on using the term as expressing a mode of communication. The French are perhaps not the only ones to use it in different ways, depending on the clinical field and the metapsychological references, and to consider this diversity not as conceptual obscurity but as the expression of a clinical and theoretical line of questioning that is open and fruitful. We need to take the enigmatic dimension of the concept seriously while recalling, after Margaret Little, the words of Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means just what I chose it to mean – neither more nor less.” And when Alice asks him whether one can make words mean so many different things, he replies: “The question is which is to be master – that’s all.” Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
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References Aguayo J (2009). On understanding projective identification in the treatment of psychotic states of mind. The publishing cohort of H. Rosenfeld, H. Segal, and W. Bion (1946–1957). Int J Psychoanal 90:69–92. Ajuriaguerra J, Diatkine R, Garcia-Badaracco G (1955). Psychanalyse et neurologie. La psychanalyse d’aujourd’hui, vol. 2, 437–98. Paris: PUF. propos du transfert chez Lacan. Quelques questions ouvertes. In: Guyomard Aisenstein M (2011). A que de psychanalyse.) P et al., editors. Lacan et le contre-transfert, Paris: PUF. (Petite bibliothe sentation: quelques repe res sur l’e valuation du concept d’identification. Rev Fr Begoin J (1984). Pre Psychanal 2:483–90. Begoin J, Begoin Guignard F (1982). Le travail du psychanalyste. Rev Fr Psychanal 46:5–6. Begoin Guignard F (1991). Identification projective et identitaire de groupe. J psychanal l’enfant 10:23–45. Bergmann M (2004). Rethinking dissidence and change in the history of psychoanalysis. In: Understanding dissidence and controversy in the history of psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Other Press. Buie DH (1981). Empathy, its nature and limitations. J Am Psychoanal Assoc 29:281–307. Duparc F (2001). The countertransference scene in France. Int J Psychoanal 82:151–69. rique et identification projective. Rev Fr Fain M, Begoin Guignard F (1984). Identification hyste Psychanal 2:515–27. tatif chez Bion. Topique 46:227–47. Fine A (1990). La trame interpre Freud S (1900). Interpretation of dreams. SE 5:525. Freud S (1921). Psychoanalysis and telepathy. SE 18:184–5. Gabbard G (1995). Countertransference: The emerging common ground. Int J Psychoanal 76:475–85. Gibeault A (2011). Chemins de la symbolisation. Paris: PUF. Green A (2004). Discussion. In: Bergmann M, editor. Understanding dissidence and controversy in the history of psychoanalysis, 344. New York, NY: Other Press. que de Guyomard P et al. (2011). Lacan et le contre-transfert. Paris: PUF. (Petite bibliothe psychanalyse.) Houzel D (1991). Identification introjective, reformation formation du symbole. J psychanal l’enfant 10:46–72. Lacan J (2006). Ecrits, Fink B, translator. New York, NY: Norton. [(1966). Ecrits. Paris: Seuil.] Laplanche J, Pontalis J-B (1973). The language of psychoanalysis, Nicholson-Smith D, translator. London: Hogarth. [(1988). London: Karnac.] [(1967). Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. Paris: PUF.] matique V: Le baquet-transcendence du transfert. Paris: PUF. Laplanche J (1987). Proble Lebovici S, Diatkine R (1954). Etude des phantasmes chez l’enfant [Study of phantasies in the child]. Rev Fr Psychanal 18:108–54. Le Guen C (2008). Dictionnaire freudien, « Grands dictionnaires ». Paris: PUF. Lothane Z (1994). The analysing instrument and reciprocal free association. J Clin Psychoanal 3:63– 86. vy. Mijolla de A (2002). Dictionnaire international de la psychanalyse. Paris: Calman Le Roazen P (2002). The problem of silence: Training analyses. Int Forum Psychoanal 11:73–7. Roudinesco E, Plon M (1997). Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse. Paris: Fayard. Sandler J (1976). Contertransference and role responsiveness. Int Rev Psychoanal 3:43–7. Sandler J (1987). The concept of projective identification. In: Sandler J, editor. Projection, identification: Projective identification, Madison, CT: International UP. Scharff JS (2004). The British object relations theories. In: Bergmann M, editor. Understanding dissidence and controversy in the history of psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Other Press. Steiner R (2009). Letters to the editors: On understanding projective identification in the treatment of psychotic states of mind. Int J Psychoanal 90:1435–7. Smirnoff V (1966). Psychanalyse de l’enfant. Paris: PUF. €cher D (2004). Dissection de l’empathie. Rev Fr Psychanal 68:981–93. Widlo €cher D (1970). On Winnicott’s ‘The maturational processes and the facilitating environment’. Int J Widlo Psychoanal 51:526–30. €cher D (2011). Le contre-transfert, un autre transfert. In: Guyomard P et al., editors. Lacan et le Widlo contre-transfert. Paris: PUF. Wyman HM, Rittenberg SM, editors (1992). The analysing instrument of Otto Isakower MD: Evolution of a psychoanalytic concept. J Clin Psychoanal 1:165–222.
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doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12217
Burial and resurgence of projective identification in French psychoanalysis €cher1 Daniel Widlo 9 rue Edouard Jacques, 75014 Paris, France – [email protected] (Accepted for publication 11 March 2014)
Curiously enough, the concept of projective identification was ignored, and even rejected in France for at least two decades after the publication of the founding texts of Melanie Klein and Herbert Rosenfeld. This rejection was due to a critique from child psychoanalysts close to Anna Freud and also from the teaching of Lacan: the first took the real mother–child relation extensively into account, while the latter only saw the internal object as a signifier. The fact that during this period the countertransference was a concept reduced to its negative content no doubt explains this deliberate ignorance. With the dissemination of a broader and more positive conception of the countertransference, a renewal of interest could be observed in the 1980s with references to empathic listening and to the effects of thought-induction. Keywords: countertransference, co-thinking, projective identification, projection
empathy,
primary
identification,
It is easier to observe and to understand how a new psychoanalytic concept was recognized or discussed in its time by psychoanalysts than to show how and why, for a time at least, such an innovation was shrouded in silence (Roazen, 2002). The attitude of French psychoanalysts towards the ‘Kleinian’ concept of projective identification is a good example of this. For at least two decades, if not three, no sooner was the term cited than its usage was contested and swiftly discarded. Today, the concept is readily used, admittedly in a variety of senses, as is the case elsewhere, but recognized at least by the younger generations. Recently, a ‘survey’ involving 30 or so ‘young’ psychoanalysts (trained over the last 15 years) showed me that all of them used this concept, or at least recognized the legitimacy of employing it, though without necessarily feeling confident about the use they were making of it! Now, even today, if I question my contemporaries or colleagues who were trained during the 1960s or 1970s, most of them recognize that it is a concept that they do not use. I have compared these testimonies with my own memories. When I was doing my training, my friends and I used to read the writings of Melanie Klein in English. Those that referred to the existence of a paranoid–schizoid phase had seemed enigmatic to us, so we put them aside; and, within this context, projective identification, an archaic process of introjection and projection, seemed far removed from our practice of psychoanalysis and from 1
Translated by Andrew Weller.
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what we understood of the young child. Such were our prejudices. The very term seemed strange. Transposed into French, literally, ‘projective identification’ became, incorrectly, ‘l’identification projective’; in short, it referred to the projective value of a form of identification and not the contrary. What sort of projection was involved? Was it to be distinguished from the Freudian concept? If the reference to a form of internalization was justified, the reference to an effect of projection remained obscure. Recently, during a discussion with Jean Laplanche, I asked him again what he felt about the use of this concept. He replied abruptly that it was a concept he did not use. Andre Green (2004), in a debate led by M. Bergmann (2004), gave a more nuanced and ambiguous response in connection with Glenn Gabbard’s article on the relations between the concepts of countertransference and projective identification. Waging war on the concept of ‘enactment’,2 he denounced Gabbard’s ‘acrobatic’ attempt to see this concept as the sign of newly emerging ‘common ground’. He pointed out that what counted for him was the distance between the individual theoretical positions, the different schools, and added that “projective identification is a purely Kleinian concept, to be recognized as such; closely related but distinct” (“She is my cousin”) (Green, 2004, p. 344)!
A concept that was initially ignored in France I will now set aside these personal memories and subjective impressions, even though it is difficult to describe the absence of the use of a concept by its mere absence or by the absence of any reference to the process that it is supposed to describe. Let us consider, first of all, the vocabularies and dictionaries. In 1967, J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis integrated it into their Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse [Language of Psychoanalysis, 1973], which was none the less resolutely limited to the language of Freud. They explain that it was a term introduced by M. Klein relating to phantasies in which the subject introduces his own person (his ‘self’) in totality or in part into the interior of the object in order to harm, possess and control it. But this phantasy closely bound up with M. Klein’s paranoid–schizoid position appears to them to be a mode of projection: “If Klein speaks of identification here it is because it is the subject’s self that is projected” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 356). And they conclude that the Kleinian usage of the expression ‘projective identification’ is consistent with the narrow sense to which psycho-analysis tends to confine the term ‘projection’, namely, the ejection into the outside world of something which the subject refuses in himself – the projection of what is ‘bad’. Just from reading these lines one is inclined to see here a simple form of identification in which the other is assimilated with the subject. There is no indication as to whether this ‘phantasy’ belongs to an early phase of development and/or to projective and identificatory movements in the adult: the conclusion (scarcely veiled) is that there is no need for this concept! 2
Translator’s note: In English in the original.
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Let it be noted right away that this would be not the case in the dictionaries that were published 30 years or so later, whether the one by E. Roudinesco and M. Plon (1997) or A. de Mijolla’s (2002) Dictionnaire in which Hinshelwood gives a very complete presentation of the history of the concept (p. 781). The only exception is the Dictionnaire freudien by C. Le Guen (2008) which, as it is devoted exclusively to the language of Freud, continues to omit it. Before exploring any further the rejection of the concept in the 1950s and 1960s, it may well be useful to look more closely at the climate in which psychoanalysis was developing in France at this time. Not long after the rebirth of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society (SPP) in 1945–46, following the dispersal, the persecutions, and the isolation of the years of occupation, a conflict erupted that would lead to a split in 1963. Beyond the institutional conflict, the debate was to become increasingly lively between a movement of thought that remained very attached to the Viennese school through the current of Ego-psychology, the theory of object-relations, studies on the direct observation and development of the child, marked by the school of Anna Freud and the work of Rene Spitz, and, another movement of thought, strongly influenced by that of Jacques Lacan, marked by the importance attached to language in the practice of analysis, to the relationship with the Other, in which the subject’s desire was held to have its source. Now we shall see that for very different reasons the two movements would each, in their own way, distance themselves from Kleinian thought and the importance that it attaches to projective identification. Beyond the equivocal nature of the term, it was the early relationship to the other that was in question. For the classical movement derived from Ego-psychology and Anna Freud’s psychoanalysis of child development, early development cannot ignore the interpersonal relationship between mother and child. In France, it was principally paediatricians who became child psychoanalysts; they were sensitive to this perspective of the actual mother–child relationship, as well to the contributions of Rene Spitz and John Bowlby. As V. Smirnoff (1966) has clearly pointed out: The fundamental reproach that these geneticist analysts [Ajuriaguerra et al., 1955; Lebovici and Diatkine, 1954] make of Klein’s work rests on her very conception of the object relation. While Melanie Klein believes psychic structuring already exists in the first months of life, leading to a separation between good and bad objects, irrespective of the nature of the object itself, the geneticists consider that structuring activity is secondary to the establishment of object-relations, a process they seek to elaborate.
Indeed, as early as 1952, in a work that claimed to be the manifesto of a fundamentally Freudian psychoanalysis, Lebovici and Diatkine (1954) had expressed very serious doubts about Kleinian points of view, taking up the critiques put forward by Glover (1956, p. 181). From one text to the other, the same argument is used again. If with regard to the theory of object-relations at least, it is clear why the concept of projective identification was given a poor reception, if not explicitly rejected, the term was not even cited by the Lacanian school which was Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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establishing itself at the time and represented more than a third of the candidates in training. It was not that Lacan was not sensitive to certain illuminating contributions of Kleinian ideas, but he saw them as openings akin to his own ideas! The ambiguity concerning the notion of the fantasy object did not bother him especially, provided that it was given the meaning he attached to it, that is to say of a signifier inserted into the field of speech: . . .language allows him [the subject] to regard himself as the stagehand, or even the director, of the entire imaginary capture of which he would otherwise be nothing more than the living marionette. Fantasy is the very illustration of this original possibility. This is why any temptation to reduce fantasy to imagination . . . is a permanent misconception, a misconception from which the Kleinian school, which has certainly carried things very far here, is not free, having failed to even glimpse the category of the signifier. (Lacan, 2006, p. 532)
The fact that this entire archaic configuration is sketched out without any reference to the real object of the drive and to the real presence of the mother is not the problem for Lacan: “The dialectic of fantasy objects promoted in practice by Melanie Klein tends to be translated in the theory in terms of identification” (ibid., p. 513). Archaic introjections and projections take place for him within a primary symbolic relationship with the other; not within a relationship of mothering, but within the imaginary relation with the other, in relation to the mirror stage. A child’s play is not for him ‘fantasmagorie’. In no way is it imaginary fascination for the object of the drive but a symbolic expression of the relation to the Other. In short, the Kleinian theory of introjection–projection (this is how he insists on referring to projective identification) is not rejected by Lacan but regarded as a precursor of his own theory. The relation to the Other is certainly a relation to desire, but with a big D, situated within a primary ontology of access to language: By showing us the primordial nature of the “depressive position”, the extremely archaic subjectivization of a kakon, Melanie Klein pushes back the limits within which we can see the subjective function of identification at work, and she especially enables us to situate the first superego formation as extremely early. (ibid., p. 94)
We can say that for Lacan the mother is held at a distance from primary fantasy, but for a different reason than the one given by the ‘geneticists’ of object-relations. The reason invoked is the symbolic order constitutive of the subject and not the ‘instinctual cooking’ which Lacan amusingly denounces in Melanie Klein’s work. This position was one to which many analysts would remain faithful, even those outside the Lacanian schools, as can be seen from R. Dorey’s intervention in the general discussion related in Projection, Identification, Projective Identification (Sandler, 1987): “In projective identification we have the enactment of an imaginary fantasy relationship, but if a change occurs . . . we witness the transition from this Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
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imaginary relationship to a more symbolic capacity for entering into relationships” (p. 134, my translation). Although the French controversies of the 1950s and 1960s partially lifted the reservations towards the Kleinian concept shared by the different schools, mention should be made of the influence of the ideas and clinical practice of D. W. Winnicott which aroused sharp interest in child psychoanalysts from both groups. But the common references to Winnicott found a point of agreement in the relative lack of interest that he accorded to the Kleinian concept: He was influenced by Klein’s ideas of unconscious fantasy, projective and introjective identification, but he rebelled against the constraints of subscribing rigidly to those views and becoming a formal member of her group. It seemed to him that the Kleinians valued the child’s phantasy to the detriment of understanding the whole world of the psychosomatic partnership of the mother and infant, while to the Kleinians he seemed too involved in physical aspects, child-rearing realities and gratifying activities. (Scharff, 2004, p. 184)
Winnicott’s critical remarks of the Kleinian concept were so rare that I omitted to mention its existence when he asked me to present his book, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, in the International Journal (Widl€ ocher, 1970).
Some positive or critical contributions announcing a renewal of interest We can say, then, that over a period of nearly 30 years, from the 1950s to the 1980s, the concept of projective identification was considered in France as a point of curiosity specific to the particularities of Kleinian theory. So there is nothing surprising in the fact that the concept was taken up, albeit rarely, in the writings of the small number of analysts who belonged to this movement. The latter, moreover, were more influenced by the contributions of H. Rosenfeld and by the importance he attached to psychotic states of mind in the process of projective identification within a certain British current of thought (see Aguayo, 2009; Steiner, 2009). Mention should be made here of the contributions by Begoin and Begoin Guignard (1982), Begoin (1984), Fain and Begoin Guignard (1984), and Houzel (1991). In these relatively late publications (note that these publications in French by ‘Kleinian’ authors date back to the 1980s!), the French authors claiming allegiance to Melanie Klein present their contribution, moreover, with modesty: “Some members of the French psychoanalytic schools are ready to accept the concept of projective identification, but they propose to translate this term by ‘identificatory projection’, which gives a better rendering of the process that has been well described by M. Klein and her successors, notably H. Segal and H. Rosenfeld”. These publications referred not only to the first contributions of Klein and her students but also to the contributions of Bion and his school (see Begoin Guignard, 1991). Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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So we can see how, after the firm condemnations of the 1950s and 1960s, ignorance or neglect of the concept were countered by the development of a Kleinian current of thought. Mention should also be made here of the contributions – independent of the conflicts between schools, and nourished by solid theoretical experience – of two ‘independent’ researchers J. Laplanche and P. Aulagnier, and of two child psychoanalysts, G. Haag and D. Houzel, who were able to make use of the concept for understanding infantile autism. Laplanche (1987) returns to the question of the status of archaic representation. Is fantasy, and thus that of ‘interiorization–projection’ of the order of fiction (the Lacanian ‘imaginary’ realm) or of the order of an original mental experience? He writes: Klein’s objects’, those famous ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects (whole or part), which fight amongst themselves within the subject, are not, in any sense, subjective ways of aiming at a real object. It is not simply my way of seeing reality, even if my vision is distorted by my fears or by my impulses. This is where I speak of ‘scandal’ since these objects are real objects for M. Klein, objects which, from this period of introjection onwards, lead their own life within the subject and provoke real, quasimechanical effects there, in particular, of aggression and excitement. The couple introjection/projected is thus substituted for – or is opposed to – the couple real/fictive. (Laplanche, 1987, p. 111)
Rather than dismissing the usefulness of this concept, I think that Laplanche was showing how he gave it meaning. What is primary, then, is the real external primary scene of attack or of linking, which becomes a real object, hallucinated, internal, ‘auto’. In an article published in 1990, A. Fine observed, at a time when the concept was resurfacing in France, that: “The mechanism of projective identification does not appear much in the theorization of Piera Aulagnier” (1990, p. 232). But he goes on to point out that in her work she apprehends the different identifications through the identificatory project of the ‘I’ (je) of the infans–child, whose difficulties of reaching ‘identificatory compromises’ and even the ‘major identificatory conflict in certain cases between the identifying ‘I’ (Je) and the identified I (je), culminating in a potential for psychosis, she explores throughout her work. With regard to later stages of development, she posits an ‘identificatory Space’ with multiple and composite entry points, a veritable ‘relational matrix’. Does this not bring us back once again, albeit in a different way, as with Laplanche, to the Kleinian way of thinking, though more here from a transferential than an ontogenetic point of view?
From projective identification to countertransference We can see, then, how, after the categorical rejections of the 1950s and 1960s, a more comprehensive approach to the concept was arrived at. As we have just seen, this was a result of the contributions both of authors of Kleinian inspiration and of more critical authors inspired by certain Lacanian points of view. But a more general phenomenon should be stressed Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
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here, which, in my view, played a decisive role here in the recognition of the concept of projective identification, namely, the emphasis placed on the countertransference as a process of critical listening to the unconscious. In parallel to the remarks I have made so far and the emphasis I have placed on the question of the silence of French psychoanalysis with regard to projective identification, we can now consider the further question of the silence of French psychoanalysis in respect of the countertransference. F. Duparc (2001) has published a very well-documented historical study on this theme. He emphasizes Lacan’s influence on this relative neglect: “For him silence was not a frustration but a manifestation of the psychoanalyst’s presence, of his participation in a non-verbal relationship. . .”. And he adds: “This attitude no doubt has to do with the brevity of Lacan’s own analysis and his difficulty, for which there is substantial evidence, in tolerating more than a modicum of transference from his patients – a trait incidentally that he shared with Sacha Nacht” (Duparc, 2001, p. 153). In a more recent study (Widl€ ocher, 2011), I have tried to show that in general this reserve stemmed more from a negative conception of the countertransference as resistance, which had its origin already in the early developments of psychoanalysis in France before the World War II. At the outset, countertransference was seen as a phenomenon which stands in the way of objective listening to the operations of the mind during the treatment, in particular, those that concern the processes of repetition and displacement linked to the transference. I shall only cite here the references that are made to it in the correspondence with Jung in connection with the ‘Spielrein’ affair, and later on in the technical writings and the correspondence with Ferenczi. All these warnings against the negative effects of the countertransference were well known – through the writings of Freud and his pupils – by the pre-war training analysts and by their pupils in the rebirth of psychoanalysis in France in 1945–1946. Through our reading and through what was transmitted to us by our teachers, we learnt how much the countertransference can lead us into making technical errors and misrecognitions while listening to the patient. A didactic analysis was the necessary instrument for avoiding this stumbling-block. From this point of view, there was no discordance between our teachers. Nacht, Lacan or Lagache seemed to share the same point of view on this subject. This principle applied to the issue of neutrality which marked the quality of the listening, and we found it again in the distant reception reserved for candidates, in the attitude of suspicion that was aroused, in the supervised analyses, by our feeble attempts at interpretation. It took me some time to understand the influence Loewenstein brought to bear on this subject. We know he was the analyst of the ‘three’ masters. In the USA, I subsequently learnt that he was renowned for his very ‘silent’ practice. From reading his work, which reflects his teaching activities in Paris from 1926–1929, one understands, moreover, the extent to which he considered these precautions as marks of tact and necessary reserve. As an example of this legitimate concern to make candidates wary of wild interpretations and hasty interventions, Loewenstein draws on the model of the analyst as a catalysing agent and stresses the risks of giving way to Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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misplaced therapeutic zeal. Above all, he writes: “What seems particularly important to me is that the analyst should always be very aware of the latent meaning, of the significance, of what he says”. This is reminiscent of Freud’s teaching according to which the ‘ideal analysis’ is one in which the psychoanalyst’s role is confined to that of a sort of catalyser which allows the analytic process to unfold by virtue of interpretations. The view that the countertransference was an obstacle to the neutrality of the objectivity of analytic listening was shared, moreover, outside France. In Great Britain, Melanie Klein and her students followed the guidelines of the Berlin Institute and the teaching of Eitingon and Sachs. In the USA, the arrival of Europeans from Berlin and Vienna rectified the deviations of Sullivan and Karen Horney, inspired by Ferenczi and an interpersonal approach. However, the 1970s were marked by quite a radical challenge to this practice. The significant lengthening of didactic analyses played a role in this. In France, Nacht called into question the indifference (which we have translated as neutrality) of the psychoanalyst, and we know how swift Lacan was to make ironical remarks about the psychoanalyst’s ‘goodness’. People began to read Ferenczi with more interest than Abraham. But it was principally in London that parallel currents emerged which attached importance to the analyst’s affective involvement for understanding the treatment process and thus for handling interpretative listening. On the Kleinian side, the interest in projective identification brought up the question of neutrality again. Was it not important to take into account the effects of projection on the analyst’s listening? Paula Heimann, who was reticent about projective identification, precisely because she could not conceive of its effects without deep involvement and self-critical listening on the analyst’s part, wrote her sensational article on the countertransference in 1949. But she had already shown, by defending Kleinian views on the effects of projection as early as 1939, in particular with regard to objectrelations how the analyst’s psychic reality was affected by the patient’s fantasies. I would like to mention the fact that during the 1970s and 1980s, a large number of Franco-British meetings took place involving clinical exchanges during which 40 or so participants had the opportunity to examine their respective practices. I recall in particular a meeting in Le Touquet, in 1975, during which I was surprised by the vigorous nature of the controversy between H. Segal and P. Heimann, two colleagues whose writings we were familiar with and with whom we had frequent personal contact, especially since P. Heimann had actively participated in the creation of my Association, the French Psychoanalytic Association (APF). On that day she was able to show our French group the extent to which the concept of projective identification had the weakness of neglecting the question of the transmission of the patient’s fantasy in the analyst’s experience of the transference. The key for the operative value of the countertransference resides for P. Heimann in the internalization of the other’s thought processes, the effects of which must be identified: Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
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When the analyst moves away from his patient, he carries out a piece of self-analysis on the spot, which later becomes the source of a fuller self-exploration outside the analytic situation. It is this quick self-analysis that enables the analyst to return to his patient, freed from the disturbances in his cognitive process and with his ‘work ego’ in good functioning order. (Paula Heimann, personal communication)
This ‘on the spot’ self-analysis might be characterized as a reactivation of the training analysis with its dual effects of treatment and learning – a necessary condition for ‘making’ a psychoanalyst.
From projective identification to empathy It was by taking into account this process of the transmission of the patient’s thought processes to those of the analyst that the ‘into’ effect of projective identification could be understood in addition to the ‘onto’ effect of fantasy. For, in order to understand how the effect of countertransference is to be distinguished from a simple projection, it is necessary to place the term identification after that of projection. Some French authors have sought, moreover, to promote the term ‘identificatory projection’ as a translation for ‘projective identification’. But this term is no more exact. True, the identification is directed towards a projected representation (the projection of the rejected internal object, the ‘onto’), but it takes possession of the other and we may well ask ourselves if this other is what the subject’s thought makes him be? This is what Sandler (1976) was to propose under the term of role responsiveness. More generally, though, should we not come back here to the concept of empathy, but in a different sense to Kohut’s use of it? I would like to put forward the idea here that empathy does not necessarily relate to a global representation of the ‘self’ of the other as is suggested by the current of self-psychology and those of intersubjectivity. Another way of seeing things consists in applying empathy not to a global representation of the self but to isolated representations, to psychic acts which are expressed in sequential scenes in associative mental activity (fantasies, memories, etc.). The empathic movement in analysis must thus be dissected, decomposed, if it is to acquire meaning. It is interesting to note, from a clinical point of view, that if the empathic movements accompanying associative listening derive their richness from the multiplicity of these inferential systems, it is expected that an interpretation that is communicated verbally to the analysand will be received by the latter as a result of a proximity of thought, and thus of an effect of empathy between the therapist and his patient. Inevitably, the analyst’s associative processes stray or deviate from the patient’s. This deviation can be expressed by false inferences, by errors of empathy which I have proposed to call movements of ‘n eguempathie’. The analyst may become somewhat distanced from the listening process; some distraction may direct his associative activity away from the session; his mind may become preoccupied by theoretical constructions or moments of self-analysis, or his attention may become focused on the words or, conversely, the movements, the gestures, Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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or intonations of the patient. If interpretation must be empathic to be heard, its sources are thus multiple. A tuning of the associative activities of the therapist and patient that is too continuous would amount to a form of collusion, or even a ‘shared delusion’. It is clear that this interplay of co-associativity is greatly enlivened by the effects of transference and countertransference in – let me emphasize – both protagonists. With reference to telepathy, Freud had already pointed out that analysis teaches us that what has been communicated by this means of induction from one person to another is not merely a chance piece of indifferent knowledge. It shows that an extraordinarily powerful wish harboured by one person and standing in a special relation to his consciousness has succeeded, with the help of a second person, in finding conscious expression. . . (1921, pp. 184–5)
It is obvious that the mental operations and the instinctual drives that animate them are indissoluble; moreover, this finds expression in the identificatory movements of rapprochement and distancing. Introjection and projection have their role to play here in the identificatory processes which result from this mental or psychical work. In the processes of thought-transference and empathy, the effects involved are undoubtedly linked to instinctual drive movements. There are two distinct levels: one is the process whereby the drives seek objects/aims, whether in an interpersonal relationship or in fantasy; the other is the way in which fantasies are expressed in representations or in acting out. It is in order to avoid the ambiguities of the term intersubjectivity that I have proposed the notion of ‘co-thinking’ to describe the effects of the associative process of the analysand’s representations on those of the analyst. The term co-thinking [co-pens ee] does not designate some new artifice, but aims to describe a process of reciprocal development of associative activity. The words (acts of thought expressed through speech) and what is signified between them, their associations, the words omitted or censored, etc., expressed through the speech of one of them enter the thought of the other, thereby becoming his own objects of thought. The effects of meaning that they produce depend both on the associative context from which they come and on that which they create in the other. Co-thinking may be considered as a vehicle of communication from one unconscious to another. From a dynamic point of view, the transfero-countertransferential interplay is part of the content and the associative dynamics of co-thinking. Thought-induction and the process of co-thinking that it creates differ radically from other modes of expression of the transfero-countertransferential relationship. Here the analyst and patient relate to each other through a fusional process, a primary identification, whereas other modes of expression allow for the enactment of an interpersonal scene that is imagined or accomplished materially in the context of the session. The associative flow of the analyst’s thinking is created by elements coming from the patient Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
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even though the latter is not directly aware of communicating them to the analyst. Our own thoughts are very often induced by what we hear, without the patient realizing it, for instance, details concerning a person or a situation in the outside world which we are also aware of. These effects of involuntary induction can easily result, moreover, in negative effects. The empathic movement in analysis must therefore be dissected and decomposed if it is to acquire meaning. It is somewhat surprising to arrive at the idea that the psychoanalytic unconscious is the unknown linking up the representations that are formed in the flow of associations rather than the representations themselves. On this view, what gives meaning to the unconscious psychic act is not the utterance, but the links between the utterances. The unconscious proper is composed along the lines of dreams: The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium. (Freud, 1900, p. 525)
The role of the ego is to extract a secondary psychic function from the network. From the mycelium, which is simply a web of relations, it must sift out a train of thought whose origins are to be sought in the tangle of the associative interactions which characterize the primary functioning of the unconscious. This point of view is closely akin to that of Bion and his notion of beta elements, elementary sensory impressions which must be transformed into constructed formations (alpha function) bearing a meaning that is capable of being expressed as such. Bion seems here to follow the psychological model in which sensations and perception are opposed. I simply wish to posit that the psychoanalytic unconscious in its ‘depth’ might depend more on the links between representations than on the representations themselves. From this point of view, only their associative connectivity, dominated by charges of affects, confers meaning on them. The setting has often been considered as a therapeutic agent in itself. The influence exerted by the objectivist school of ego-psychology on the developments of psychoanalysis in France after the war attests to this. If one considers the setting as a context that is necessary for the application of the fundamental rules, as I propose to do, it can be seen that it derives its therapeutic value, first and foremost, from the meaning that it constructs between the two participants, and that interpretation can be considered as the expression of this common work. Interpretation must be understood as a direct effect of co-thinking. The associative networks produced in the psychoanalyst must be understood as the expression of the analysand’s psychic reality. Insofar as elements that are absent from the preconscious associative network are at work, the analyst’s psychic work allows him to identify the analysand’s unconscious representations or associations. Hypothetical representations and latent Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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interpretations are thereby formed which may then come to the analyst’s mind at a suitable moment and be communicated to the analysand, opening up a new path to his associative networks. Co-thinking creates a repertoire of potential interpretations, of ‘key representations’, which are capable of ‘unlocking’ a preconscious system resisting the pressures of the unconscious (the small portion of the id of which Freud speaks in Analysis terminable and interminable). This interest for the concept of empathy clearly has parallels in American currents following Ferenczi which are still very active (Lothane, 1994; Wyman and Rittenberg, 1992), but it was widely taken up again in the 1980s (Buie, 1981) and gave rise to numerous publications (see Widl€ ocher, 2004).
Conclusion M. Aisenstein has recently established a connection between a critical conception of the countertransference and Lacan’s disregard for projective identification (Aisenstein, 2011, in Guyomard et al., 2011, p. 78): “I think I have a better understanding today of the ‘reproach’ Lacan makes of the countertransference when he writes: ‘We need to be wary of this inappropriate term’. It is true that there is as much reason to deplore the silence which surrounded the concept up until the 1950s as the fashionable effect that surrounded it thereafter.” But she adds: “I mean that projective identification, in my view, is part of the conceptions of countertransference as much in Marty and Green, which explains why French psychoanalysis has had little recourse to this concept.” Does this mean that the concept of countertransference would have sufficed for the French? But it is precisely when one takes the countertransference seriously that one speaks of projective identification. Basically, if, initially, French psychoanalysts gave the concept a cool reception, it was not only because of the ambiguity of the term when translated word for word into French but also because of the multiple clinical and theoretical references to which it could be attached. Admittedly, the resistances to its usage lay in sources which nourished French psychoanalysis, but it has to be said that the French did not obtain the clarifications they were seeking from their English-speaking colleagues and friends. Today, the French seem resigned to considering the concept as belonging to a complex theoretical and clinical field and to making use of it in a variety of contexts. There is general agreement (Gibeault, 2011) on using the term as expressing a mode of communication. The French are perhaps not the only ones to use it in different ways, depending on the clinical field and the metapsychological references, and to consider this diversity not as conceptual obscurity but as the expression of a clinical and theoretical line of questioning that is open and fruitful. We need to take the enigmatic dimension of the concept seriously while recalling, after Margaret Little, the words of Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means just what I chose it to mean – neither more nor less.” And when Alice asks him whether one can make words mean so many different things, he replies: “The question is which is to be master – that’s all.” Int J Psychoanal (2014) 95
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