Melanie Klein Trust

Discussion on Projective Identification – Transcript

Contributors from the audience

JOHN STEINER
Tonight we’re really partly celebrating the book that Red [Edna O’Shaughnessy]
and Liz [Elizabeth Spillius] have brought out. It’s a considerable achievement
and I think it’s unusual that it’s actually well worth reading [laughter], it’s an
assembly of papers. I think that this is such an interesting topic, and it’s so
complex and difficult, but we’re all hoping that discussing it tonight we’ll all
come away a little bit clearer. And, I think we’re all aware of the importance of
the concept, but we want to get our minds round it in a more complete way. So
we’re just going to have a very simple introduction from Liz, followed by another
one equally short, from Red, and then the meeting’s open to the floor. And then
Ignes [Sodre] and Ron [Britton], who have both written in a very original way
about projective identification, will take part in the discussion. I’ll ask Liz to
begin.

ELIZABETH SPILLIUS
Thanks John. I think, my reaction to this concept, especially at the beginning,
was, “what an odd concept” – that you had two completely contrasting ideas, or
so they seemed to me; because ‘projective’ implies difference, even
contradiction, certainly movement, and identification implies likeness, similarity.
And what was she going to do with this? This was many years ago and I was
reading it for the first time. And it’s not surprising I think that this was a relatively

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late idea in Klein’s writing, and it came with ‘Notes on Some Schizoid
Mechanisms,’ a paranoid-schizoid position. If you’re interested in it, you’ll find a
really good description of projective identification (Proj-Id to Red and me) in
1959 in ‘Our Adult World and Its Roots in Infancy,’ where Klein gives a nice,
simple, clear presentation – I think she was going to speak at Napsbury
Hospital or something like that, so that it’s easier to understand and simpler.
She writes, it seems to me, as if there are two objects, two people, and things
are going on between these two, and she soon says that it’s not only bad things
that are projected, she wants to correct that right away; that good things are
also projected. At one point she implies that good things may be projected
because the individual feels that he doesn’t deserve to have bad things. But
then she broadens it out a bit, and she said, and indeed this fitted with my
feeling, which was that there was something much more fundamental than that
about it, and that was curiosity. She doesn’t use that word, but it certainly I think
comes into it. If I were involved in such an exchange, I thought, I would want to
know, who and what is this other, who is both different from me but also, at the
same time, the same as me? And could I have their good things? And could I
put up with their bad things? And are we really so different, or are we basically
similar, basically the same? And this is linked with Ron’s idea, the distinction
between attributive and acquisitive projective identification, because certainly in
the clinical material you do occasionally come up against a person who is not
so much getting rid of things from himself, but very keen on getting hold of the
things the other person has; so acquisition is quite important.

How does one think about these things? In my experience you just hope for the
best, and try and make sense of what is going on between you and your
patient, and keep the idea in the back of your mind, not the foreground. There is
another remarkable thing about this concept, and I still don’t really understand
it; which is the speed with which the idea has spread, and the number of places
that is has spread to, and so quickly. My first experience of this was in 2002,
which by Proj-Id standards is perhaps a little late, anyway, which was a meeting
of the European Psychoanalytic Federation, and there were papers given by
Helmut Hinz from Germany, Jorge Canestri from Italy (he also talked quite
extensively about Spain), and Jean-Michel Quinodoz about the French-
speaking people in Europe, but in the end he talks (in a rather nice paper in the
book) about French attitudes, wherever French is spoken, to this particular
concept. And the idea has also spread to North America, South America,
Australia, New Zealand, even parts of China, and Japan. Why is a mystery to
me. Is it so very useful or is it just because it is fashionable for a while? I’ve
never quite understood it. But anyway, one can say it’s a sort of infectious
concept; if the next-door-neighbour’s got it one has to have it oneself. So that’s
my introduction.

JOHN STEINER
We’ll have some things to say about it I’m sure, and we’ll want to ask Liz
questions, but shall I ask Red to say her piece?

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EDNA O’SHAUGHNESSY
Well, I just want to continue on with the two things that Liz is talking about; the
apparent contrariness within the concept of projective identification itself, on the
one hand, and the unusual speed with which the concept has spread through
the analytic world. In regard to the ‘contrariness’ of the concept, there is also
another curious fact, that Klein introduced it in terms of schizoid mechanisms
and, after her, the most notable contributor was of course Bion, who introduced
it about something quite opposite: fundamental contact. There have been also
many other facets to the concept, and I found myself thinking that Wittgenstein
has said something very interesting, and I think a propos about concepts. For
instance, he said in regard to the concept of thinking: “it is not to be expected of
this word that is should have a unified employment, rather we should expect the
opposite.” And this was part of his general philosophy of language, that we
should stop imagining concepts have essences, and realise rather that it’s more
a question of what he called ‘family resemblances.’ And it seems to me that it is
really true of the concept of projective identification that there’s a whole bunch,
not of essences that you could pick out – ah! It’s in this and that and that –
because it isn’t like that, but of family resemblances.

I also have a thought (I don’t know if it’s the right one) about the speed with
which the concept has been taken up. And I wonder whether it has something
to do with the fact that, though the phenomenon didn’t have a name, the
phenomenon itself has been existent between human beings forever and a day;
that it’s known, say, that one person has an effect upon another, and it’s also
known – we’ve only got to think about literature and poetry – that people make
arrangements about carrying bits each for the other. I mean, in psychoanalysis,
it did have its forerunners of course. There was Freud and what he said about
Michelangelo, and more generally what Freud emphasised, ie that one
unconscious can speak directly to another unconscious. Anna Freud had this
very interesting example of the identification with the aggressor, and the term
itself was in the air at the time that Melanie Klein introduced it, which Liz notes
in the book’s introduction. In our society, Marjorie Brierley used the term
‘projective identification,’ though she didn’t follow it through. And then Klein
named it, and she moved it to the centre of the Kleinian psychic stage, in that
she linked it with anxiety, drives, defences, in ‘Notes on Schizoid Mechanisms’.
And I wonder whether the fact that it is so central and really ordinary a
phenomenon in life, not just in psychoanalysis, that, although it had no name
before, this is one of the reasons it has been so rapidly taken over. I was even
thinking, we have a nursery rhyme: ‘Jack Sprat could eat no fat/ And his wife
could eat no lean,/ Between them both they licked the platter clean.’ [laughter
from audience] I was thinking of Liz and me, we probably had our divisions
when we did the editorial work, each knowing well what the other would or
would not carry.

JOHN STEINER
Well I think we should just open it up and see what lines you’d like to take up,
and how you’d like to use the evening.

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[long pause]

I suppose, while you’re getting over your shyness, I’ll show how little shy I am.
Because I’m struck by the complexity of the concept, but I do think it is a unified
concept; I think it needs to be elaborated in some detail, and I think of it – I was
struck by Red’s use of this idea of family of meanings – but I think of it as a
geography, a geographical space where things happen between people, and if
we want to understand it we’ve got to be willing to describe the complexities.
And, you can immediately see how complex it is, because there are multiple
identifications, and I always think they are beautifully described by Freud in his
paper on Leonardo da Vinci, where Freud says that Leonardo identified with his
mother, and took as his object himself. So in our parlance we would say he
projected a child self in his pupils, and that was projective identification,
disowning the self and attributing it to the pupil. But that’s not the only thing that
happened, the other thing was that he acquisitively identified with his mother,
and one question I’d like to ask the panel: what about introjective identification?
If you take in an image of a mother – is that introjective? Or do you project
yourself into the mother and acquisitively grab that identity? But whatever it is
you’ve got a self identified with the mother, but another part of the self
disowned, and I think that clearly requires splitting – you can’t have projective
identification without splitting. If you realise that at the same time the object is
conducting a similar exercise – splitting and identifying – you can just imagine
how complex the situation is, and many of us have been interested in the way
that the analyst uses projective identification for their own defences, and how
the patient all the time feels projected into. So that’s all I wanted to say, I just
think that there are things that we can get our mind around, but it’s very
complex, and each individual situation, clinically, has to be described; you can’t
just say, “I noticed projective identification was going on”, that’s a bit like saying,
“I noticed breathing was going on” You have to actually describe it. Henri Rey
used to have this statement, he would say, “You’ve got to ask yourself: what
part of the self, with what motives, reacts to what part of the object, with what
motives and with what consequences?” And I think something like that’s
required; what part of the self in identification with what object is relating to
whom, distorted by what projection? And that requires an individual answer, but
I’m just putting that forward in the hope that it will raise different questions from
the audience.

ELIZABETH SPILLIUS
Incidentally, Klein always called it “my splitting paper”. She didn’t call it “my
projective identification paper”.

JOHN STEINER
Is that David Bell?

DAVID BELL
Yes. I just want to take a bit further what’s been said in the introductory
comments, because it’s a concept that I feel very split about. That is, when I
teach it, I try my best to make the strong claim that projective identification is an

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internal event, it’s not an interpersonal event, that is, that one can’t map a
psychic mechanism onto an interpersonal situation, that they are different kinds
of thing. So I try to imagine the situation, for example, where someone feels left
out and alone, and they’re on their own in their room, and then they imagine
themselves very superior to someone else, and imagine that person watching
them, and feeling left out and alone. And then of course they feel better; they’ve
not met anyone. They’ve, if you like, become acquisitively identified with one
object, and projected something into another. But then they might go and meet
someone, and act upon them in such a way as to make that internal
rearrangement of things have an instantiation in reality; for instance by meeting
someone, and making them feel very envious of them. So, that’s the two-stage
version of the concept, the first being projective identification, all occurring
internally and in fantasy, with consequences, how the person feels, and the
latter being its actualisation, so that’s following Joe Sandler’s and Michael
Feldman’s model. And I think the reason I do that is because so often I hear
people say, “Well it can’t have been projective identification because I wasn’t
affected,” as if the barometer is how the other person feels, and not on the
understanding of what’s going on with the person. That being said, I’m never
completely convinced by my own argument, because I’m also persuaded that
there is this direct unconscious contact which seems to me to be a different kind
of concept to the first one. But I suppose what I’m saying is that it seems
conceptually difficult – perhaps part of the problem is there being no essence,
of it being part of a family – to map an internal defensive procedure, to look for
its evidential basis in a real external person.

JOHN STEINER
Now, anyone on the panel may want to respond…

RON BRITTON
Now I think what I’m going to say may connect a bit with what David’s just said,
because after all the concept as described by Klein from her paper, was at a
time when she was particularly being informed by, I think, by her analysis of
Herbert Rosenfeld, from whom she must have been hearing about his
schizophrenic patients a great deal. And I think it was in that context, and
therefore at that point it was a psychotic phenomenon that was being
addressed. Like most psychoanalytic explanatory concepts, they start out as
psychopathology and turn out to be normal. What I mean is that it’s like
medicine, in other words the abnormal leads the way to seeing normal states
and mechanisms, as with the Oedipus complex, as with the depressive position,
and as with projective identification. But it’s one of those concepts I think, that is
really valid because it has arisen – knowledge of it, that is – has arisen really
out of psychoanalytic experience. It hasn’t come from outside and been grafted
in, it’s really from the practice. And it’s very early – I think I’m taking over from
Red here – it’s very early, because, if you take Klein for instance, her Berlin
child cases are absolutely full of examples of projective identification, which she
is analysing without naming it. But the Erna case, for instance, is absolutely
riddled with it – which we would now say is projective identification – but doesn’t
use the name. And the best example of all is in Freud, and I’m going to read a

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short extract from a paper of Freud’s which I didn’t find until after I thought I’d
introduced a new idea, and then discovered of course, as with Freud’s famous
footnotes, that he’d described it exactly. And this was the idea of acquisitive
projective identification, my term, with one or other of the parental couple in the
primal scene; and that’s what this paper is about. It’s called ‘A Case of Paranoia
Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease’. He wrote it just
after he wrote ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ so it’s about 1915. I’ll just describe
very briefly a bit out of the paper, and I think you’ll see what I mean. It was an
analytic case, it was a case he was consulting about, because there was a
young woman and she wanted to sue someone, and her lawyer brought her to
Freud to test out the validity of what she was saying. The young woman
claimed that a man had abused her by getting unseen witnesses to photograph
them while they were making love, and that this now gave him power to bring
disgrace on her. So that was the young woman who was brought. A very
attractive young woman, thirty, an only child, still lived with mother, father had
died years ago, and a man at the office, her office, who she couldn’t marry –
Freud’s very discreet about why, we imagine it’s because he is married – but
who persuaded her to his rooms in the day time. And I’m now quoting Freud (I
can’t do better!): “They kissed, embraced, as they lay side by side, and he
began to admire the charms as they were now partly revealed to him. In the
midst of this idyllic scene however, she was frightened by a noise, a kind of click
or a knock, and she was reassured by the chap that it was a clock. However,
we don’t know what happens then, but we then hear that when she was leaving
she sees two strangers, to her, on the stairs, and one of them has a small box
wrapped up, and she develops the idea as she walks away, that this could have
been a camera, and there could have been a man hidden behind the curtain,
taking a photograph. So she starts a campaign to complain to the lover, or
would-be lover.” Well Freud then talks about his explanation, and that’s what I
really wanted to draw our attention to – at first he points out that this paranoia of
the woman does not conform to the pre-existing psychoanalytic idea, the
current idea, that it’s based on homosexuality, as a basis, and points out that
this is in a heterosexual context. And he adds (this is Freud): “Among the store
of unconscious fantasies of all neurotics and probably all human beings there is
one, of watching the sexual intercourse of parents. This is a primal fantasy.” He
then goes on to fully elaborate, and says, “It’s clear that for this woman the
patient’s lover was her father, but she had taken her mother’s place; and the
listener and watcher was a third party, which had originally been herself. And
instead of choosing her mother as a love object, she identified with her: she
became her mother.” Well, what more can you say? Tucked away in that paper
– and it’s fascinating, all it needs is the name. And Freud quite often, I think,
uses the concept in his work, comes across it here and there, very clearly.

JOHN STEINER
Thank you.

EDNA O’SHAUGHNESSY
Fascinating.

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JOHN STEINER
OK. Yes, Phil, Phil Crockatt.

PHIL CROCKATT
What Ron has just described, the passage from Freud, chimed in with
something I was thinking in relation to the earlier points, about why this concept
is so infectious. And, it seems to me that one thing that Ron’s description brings
alive is another of Klein’s great discoveries, which is the internal world of object
relationships, which it seems to me in that passage of Freud we get a very vivid
sense of – plus the idea of identifications with different kind of objects. And if
you think about her other paper, ‘Transference: the total situation’, you get a far
richer version of the transference, which we’ve had a very good illustration of,
and it seems to me that the concept of projective identification does provide the
underpinning, the mental mechanism, which then explains this far more
complex and rich version of the unconscious internal world of object
relationships. The way this is following what Dave Bell was saying, actualised
and enacted in the interaction with the analyst, and so it’s interesting what Dave
was saying about projective identification being an internal concept. I think it’s
quite complex, it does include, for me anyway, the enactment and the
actualisation, and that presumably – I don’t know what the panel would think
about this – this is one of the reasons that it has become such a rich concept,
because it really keys in with the emphasis on the transference, and a very rich
version of the transference, and the recreation of the internal world compared
with the very early concepts.

JOHN STEINER
Catalina?

CATALINA BRONSTEIN
Yes, thank you very much. I was following what Ron was saying and thinking
that, obviously Freud had already introduced the notion of internal objects and
also of identification – it's already there in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. I was still
wondering specifically about the differences between acquisitive projective
identification and identification. One question is what are the specific
differences? We tend to use the notion of acquisitive projective identification.
The other question which I think is a concept that Rosenfeld also explored in his
notion of 'psychotic islands', which I think is a very helpful and useful concept,
has to do with projective identification that happens within the same subject in
relation to different parts of the body. He described how through splitting and
projective identification phantasies can be felt to be lodged in a part of the body.
And, I’m interested in this because I think it’s perhaps useful to think what is the
difference between this and the mechanisms that we can sometimes see in
hysteria, how much we would think of using the notion of projective
identification in relation to hysteria. Even though it is not the same, in relation to
psychosomatics I think that Rosenfeld’s example of psychotic islands is quite
useful.

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JOHN STEINER
Let’s just go on collecting thoughts and the panel will come in when they feel
like it, ok?

EDNA O’SHAUGHNESSY
I was just thinking the notion of ‘actualise’ that Phil Crockatt mentioned, was of
course Joseph Sandler’s, in his most excellent paper, which we’ve got in this
book. He asks, how can you take this concept without taking the whole Kleinian
package? And he thinks you can, and he himself certainly did, I think, put it in
another psychoanalytic perspective, which is something we paid attention to in
our book.

JOHN STEINER
Dave Taylor?

DAVID TAYLOR
I thought that when Red referred to Wittgenstein, she was going to say – it’s a
quotation I always get wrong – “of that we cannot speak thereof we must be
silent.” Because it seems to me that one of the important aspects of projective
identification is its nonverbal nature, and one could link that with the
development that Bion introduced, which was to say in a more fundamental
sense than had been said before in psychoanalysis, that human beings are
social animals. Freud had obviously spoken about human beings as herd
animals, but it seemed to me Bion was saying that we are fundamentally
connected with each other, and – now I don’t know if he explicitly says this, or
it’s just implicitly there and self-evident – is projective identification the means
by which we are social animals? And the bond between us is fundamentally
nonverbal. And then the question is, does that have to depend on something
called phantasies, unconscious phantasies, or is it just what we do, just what we
are, as it were, just our equipment? Then a further question I would like to say
is: can the forms of projective identification that seem more solely intrapsychic,
where the psychotic patient no longer bothers to check that the projection has
been effected, they just have a bad object that exists about them, that watches
them. Now, are those forms of projective identification, can they be largely
explained – or, to what extent can they be accounted for on the basis of the
breakdown of the normal communicational function, for which, as Bion said, you
need an emitter and you need a receptor (you know, the baby needs a mother
and the mother needs a baby)…? There hasn’t, as maybe Dave Bell pointed
out, there hasn’t really been a resolution of the conception of unconscious
fantasy that Hanna Segal used to say, look this is a fantasy, and the conception
of projective identification, which regards it as a form of interpersonal
communication.

EDNA O’SHAUGHNESSY
It surely is important to stress that this is nonverbal, without words. Didn’t Freud
think of consciousness as the organ for the perception of psychic qualities, and
don’t we see this going on, wordlessly, even between little babies and their

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mothers, that a baby will perceive without words the depression of a depressed
mother? Later of course, this might get put into words, but that’s all much later.

JOHN STEINER
Cyril Couve?

CYRIL COUVE
Just to pick up on what David and David said, the discussion of when is it a
fantasy as compared to a communication with an Other; isn’t it quite axiomatic
in Kleinian metapsychology that, alongside the properties of the unconscious
mind that Freud mapped out, that what is fundamental is cycles of introjection
and projection? So there’s never a phantasy which is not projected and then re-
introjected in a certain form. And I wonder whether it is for Klein, whatever
phantasy it is, it always goes out and is enacted or actualised in this way.

JOHN STEINER
It seems to me there are kind of two themes evolving; one is this issue of
phantasy versus interaction, and I think that we might want to pursue that, and
the other is, I thought, to do with the question of, sort of, verbal understanding
versus nonverbal, and both of those seem to me interesting and connected. It
would be nice to see how our thoughts develop about those.

ELIZABETH SPILLIUS
I find that particularly interesting, because I think, particularly after reading large
chunks of the archive, that Klein was using this idea for a long time without
knowing she was using it; it wasn’t conceptualised in her thinking. And then,
perhaps partly inspired by other people in the British Society, she began to find
words for it. But she kept the contradictoriness of it, which I think was
particularly valuable, because it’s such an important part of it, and she kept
also, in the way she used it, the feeling of its being often quite bottled in, not
with words but then words would come in to crystallize what was happening.
And this was a considerable accomplishment, because…of course, that was the
way she thought, she did things for quite a long time before she tried to
understand what she was doing.

RON BRITTON
I feel we’re sort of going round the edge of something a bit in our responses,
which is to do with the notion of projective identification as a psychopathology,
which it undoubtedly is in some situations, and when it’s normal. And for me,
being very basic, clinically I think of three situations. One is of, if you like,
psychopathological projective identification, such as the acquisitive kind I was
talking about, or quoting Freud as talking about, or the attributive kind, in which
some aspect of the self is got rid of and allocated to somebody else. But there’s
also normal projective identification. And I think there’s another category, which
is the absence of projective identification. And I think it gives a particular quality
of unreality to the countertransference, which underlies the kind of cases that
are sometimes called ‘as if’ cases and so on, in which the communication is
never backed up with the usual invisible communication, so that the words may

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be there, the telling may be there, the narrative may be there, and one cannot
get a sense of being impacted by it. And in some patients it’s very striking; so I
think there are three situations really.

ELIZABETH SPILLIUS
And the communication isn’t quite there, often. It is not quite there.

KATE BARROWS
I have two points. One is a question: are we saying that almost all
communication is projective identification of one kind or another, either for
communicative purposes or psychopathological? Can we talk about
communication that doesn’t involve this, or are we saying that it’s present in all
our emotional communications? That’s my question; I don’t feel I have the
answer to it. And the other thing is just a thought about the importance of the
nonverbal arts in communicating through projective identification. I think music
does this extremely powerfully, as do the visual arts, so that’s another thought.
That’s all I had to say.

JOHN STEINER
Thank you very much.

IGNES SODRE
Can I just say something, two somethings? One is that we have this word which
has become so important, and this concept which is so crucial and so on. But I
think, to start with, it’s not a very good word, it’s a word we adopted, it’s a term
we adopted – two words together – and we know what we mean, and we know
there are different forms of it, and there are different strengths of it, and different
versions of it, but I don’t think we actually believe that there’s ever a process
which involves just projection and not introjection. It’s a very basic point, but I
think it’s important to remember that we baptised this concept ‘projective
identification,’ although it’s a mixture always. Even Ron’s definition of attributive,
acquisitive and so on, obviously comes with introjection, and it’s terribly
important not to think about it as just projection, even though we call it that. And
the other thing that I wanted to say: there are various kinds of it, and Ron just
gave his version of the various kinds, but there are two things that I think are
rather fundamental, which are: how great it is, how powerful, how total, or how
minor, the different sizes of the projective identification, how much actually
takes over the object, or in fantasy takes over the object, and how much is sort
of fleeting and part of everyday – I can only understand you if I for a moment
step in your shoes and then step back in my shoes, and I know what it is to be
you, and so on. These kinds of things that are changing roles, in very minor
ways, but there is no way of having an object relationship if you’re not doing
that very fundamental thing of shifting places. And then you have the other
extreme of it, I think we called it massive projective identification, in which it can
become absolutely rigid, and can become a kind of character trait, and that
person has become whatever it is, and then there’s a very, very pathologically
rigid identification with some internal logic, presumably. And you also have
people who have sort of successive identifications, very quickly with different

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objects. I was rereading some of the archives in the book and I thought how
Mrs Klein talks about a particular mix of particular interpretations which she
says, in this story, Patient H was character A, character B, character C and
character D, and she’s talking about fragmentation. But some people also very
much are like that; it’s just their identifications are rapid and shallow and too
quick, so you have a feeling that this person isn’t anybody in particular because
they are shifting. But also the form of identification in which one totally becomes
the object really, as Cathy said, is first described in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’:
you say, “I’m the worst person in the world”, and in fact you mean the object,
that’s a massive projective identification. There’s also Anna Freud and the
identification with the aggressor, I think that was really the first description of
projective identification, which again is about the self becoming completely the
object and, for that period of time, believing himself to be the object, except he’s
not the object because he’s himself. So I think the projective identification of
becoming somebody else is very, very different from the ordinary taking a bit of
the other role and coming back, and so on.

JOHN STEINER
Robin?

ROBIN ANDERSON
Yes, I, I was just thinking, in a way it’s linked a bit to what Dave Bell was saying
earlier, but – and, it’s been taken up, but you know, this whole question of the,
…it seems sort of unthinkable, I would say, to most Kleinian analysts and an
awful lot of other ones, not to be absolutely steeped in how the patient is
affecting you. And I was thinking how Melanie Klein was very, very suspicious
of this – and I think in some ways Hanna Segal was a bit actually, she did allow
it, and feel she was influenced by it (I have a special means of knowing this
[laughter]). But she was quite guarded about it. What I think is one of the things
that is remarkable about this concept, is that it has, in its further
development…and I was going to say that, my first supervisor was Betty
Joseph, and right from the beginning, from the very first session I ever took to
her, she was very interested in one’s countertransference, and you had to really
scrutinise that in relation to the material, and it wasn’t that it wasn’t extremely
disciplined but there was a sort of anxiety about a kind of chaos, I think, that
analysts were so guarded about, their own psychopathology, their own
neurosis, the enormous danger you expose yourself to by being with a
patient…and having to feel you’ve got to hold yourself together, and then you
try and analyse the pathology, and there were all sorts of terrific developments
that took place in that way. And somehow, what David Taylor was saying, that
man is a social animal, and that projective identification may be one of the key
means of communication, and indeed harm – it’s another kind of war if you like
– that takes place. So, it’s massively important, and it gave us a language, and
it’s gradually given us more confidence to feel that we can talk about ourselves
in a way that has to own all sorts of uncomfortable things that we know probably
are about our own neurosis, and at the same time are mines of riches when it
comes to trying to understand the patient, and I feel as though, the way that it’s
used now – and of course it’s misused and that’s one of the dangers – but that

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when it is used carefully, it’s provided us, and it’s second nature I think to most
analysts, but it’s provided us with a means of having a place to contain some of
this dilemma which lies between, if you like, countertransference which means
you need more analysis, and countertransference that’s a means of working
something through.

JOHN STEINER
Now we’re getting a lot of hands at the same time. Michael?

MICHAEL MERCER
I thought it was very helpful that Liz began the discussion by drawing attention
to the very particular nature of the concept; that it’s not a single concept, that at
its heart is a sort of dynamic, it is actually a process of a splitting, a movement,
a to and a fro. And, I thought that Ignes’ contribution really described for me
some of the very core qualities of it, which are quite different, in a way, to the
normal kind of psychoanalytic concept. I mean, normally we talk about fantasy
and oedipal fantasy, or a fantasy of a persecuting object, but these are pictorial
kinds of concepts that we use to structure relationships and internal psychic
states. But, I thought what Ignes then described really was that this concept,
because it is at its heart a dynamic one, introduces all kinds of different
measures, you might say, into the sort of real life experience; that is, that you
talk about the speed of projective identification, you talk about the quantity of it,
you talk about the persistence or the temporariness of it; and in a way you could
start using these concepts of measurement or quantitative measurements: is
this a psychotic kind of projection? A communicative kind of projection? And I
think these are all more sort of quantitative kinds of concepts, which sort of fill
out, what Red was talking about this family, so to speak, that there are these
different versions, and at the heart of these different versions are different
quantitative aspects. And when we’re in the clinical situation, of course, we are
very responsive – or try to be responsive – to these quantitative aspects, and
measure our own responses to these things. But I think the way it’s so
appealing, and the sense of the way the concept has caught on, is that it
includes something that’s not quite, although as Ron said it has been
discovered by psychoanalysis, it uses different kinds of measures and different
kinds of conceptual frameworks to fill out something which is essentially alive
and dynamic.

JOHN STEINER
David?

DAVID SIMPSON
Thanks. I want to sort of contribute something to the question of how much the
concept is, you could say, a normal process, and how much it’s present in
pathological states. And I suppose, coming to this, my thinking is rather
informed by my interest in a particular sort of pathology, particularly in autism
and autistic states, where there has always been a recognition of fundamental
difficulty in making effective contact, empathic contact, with other people and
other things, at quite profound levels. And I think that particular sort of

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understanding brings us into thinking about the concept from the point of view
of Bion’s idea of it being a primary process occurring between infant and
mother, and mother and infant in mutual understanding. But I’m also struck by
the fact that it’s viewed as an omnipotent fantasy, it’s based upon an
omnipotent fantasy – well, the question then is, when is that omnipotent fantasy
a normal process, and when is it abnormal? And are we always in the presence
of omnipotent fantasy? Then I think it raises the question as to how much the
idea of projective identification is only one facet of the use of fantasy and
projective communication in the development of communicative processes;
which I suppose raises the issue not so much, when is it abnormal and normal,
but is it actually something that develops? There’s a development to projective
identification and there are normal trajectories to that, so that it can go up a
normal path, or it may start going off in all sorts of abnormal ways, some of
them quite fundamental such as in autism, and in others where, perhaps, we
just are perhaps more returnable to, which we see in more normal states.

JOHN STEINER
Who is that in front of David? Oh, Malka.

MALKA HIRSCH-NAPCHAN
Just to take on from that, and to link with something that John, said before
about Henri Rey saying about, with what purpose or what intention is the
projection happening; and I was thinking also about what we heard about from
Freud, and thoughts I have, and I would like the panel’s opinion about that, I
found Donald Meltzer’s distinction between intrusive projective identification and
projective identification very useful, which is more, according to him, Bion’s
contribution. And I think about the intrusive aspect of projective identification as
something that perhaps helps us organize and orientate ourselves, in order to
understand the impact of projective identification and its pathological aspect or
more communicative developmental aspects. And I’d like the panel’s opinion
about that.

JOHN STEINER
Giovanna?

GIOVANNA DI CEGLIE
Yes, I would just like to add to the latest comment because even intrusive
projective identification has got a communicative connotation, because it tells
us something about the nature of the object into which projections occur. And I
think that part of the difficulty in thinking about projective identification is that we
tend to talk about it in terms of a mechanism or the mind of the patient, but can
we actually find a way of talking about it in relation to the mind of the receptor?
And I think that’s when it gets so complicated because when we think, is it
normal or pathological, are we right in thinking about that, rather than thinking in
terms also of the mind of the receptor, whether there is a normal way of
recepting, which I think is the work of Bion in a sense, where he actually
thought that if there is a mind which can cope with the projection, there is a
sense of transformation of the projection. So, even if the projection might be

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pathological, so to speak, it gets transformed in the mind of a so-called normal
reception – so things get very complicated indeed!

RON BRITTON
I’d like to go back to something I was trying to say before about pathological
and normal, because I think what psychoanalysis does is rather what medicine
does in relation to physiology, rather than physiology in relation to medicine.
What I mean by that is, a good deal of physiology is discovered through clinical
states of abnormality in medicine, and that’s really how psychoanalysis has
grown, so it’s a bit like – and we seem to be moving all the time – when is it
normal? Because my feeling is that if we thought about it in terms of the time of
Harvey, it’s as if we discover heart failure, and as a consequence we then
discover the circulation of the blood, and then we start to get interested in, well
maybe it’s necessary for the blood to circulate; and that’s what we’re saying, in
a way. So, then there is this notion of this mechanism or (I prefer a less
mechanical word really) process which can communicate, but we also tend to
judge, do we not – taking your point – as to what is communicated, taking the
countertransference. So we like to think, don’t we, that it’s a normal projective
identification if what we get on the receiving end is something like horror , and if
it’s effectively mobilized; because I think communicative, effective projective
identification, in some way or other, resonates with something in us on the
receiving end, so we don’t necessarily welcome these projections, and we may
be inclined to think that the abnormality is because we don’t like what’s
projected – if it’s rage or if it’s horror, or if it’s something unpleasant, or nausea,
which is a very unpleasant countertransference – but none the less occur. Is
that normal projective identification? The mechanism is being used at that point,
and this is what Bion would have thought was communicative projective
identification, of projection of beta into alpha and so on. But of course it may
involve the projection of what we would like to think of as rather abnormal
mental states.

EDNA O’SHAUGHNESSY
Could I just add something to emphasize something that Ron was saying and
what you were saying, about the receptor? Because it seems to me that, lately,
there’s been a bit of a new emphasis on, not only what projective identification
puts into the receptor (I’m really thinking of us as the receptor, the analyst), but
also what these projective identifications can pull out of us, and that many of
our patients have got a very good eye for what’s in there, and they want to get it
out. And think this is a very important aspect that adds to our sense of
vulnerability and exposure; these things that our patients pull out of us.

JOHN STEINER
I think the discussion has gone in a very interesting way, very important. I think
Giovanna put it neatly in terms of the receptor, but I think it’s the whole of Bion’s
discussion of containment. I don’t think now that we can discuss projective
identification almost as if the object was just a receptacle, so that the two have
to be thought of together, and of course, if we think of projective identification as
a means of understanding, of being understood, we’ve got to remember it can

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also be a means of misunderstanding, and the aim may be to be
misunderstood, and yet there’s a kind of meta-understanding: if the analyst can
understand that, there’s yet a further sense of the communication getting
through. And I always think of Bion saying this patient was so boring that he
was interesting, you know he was fascinated, and I think Ron’s describing
someone who can’t use projective identification. I remember Ruth Riesenberg
stressing this, that she had a patient who would threaten to commit suicide but
left her totally cold, she was completely indifferent, she thought, how can I be so
indifferent, what’s not getting through? But then there’s a meta-level, there’s
something about a coldness that is being projected, and there’s a mental state
experienced by the analyst as a result, which perhaps could be understood if
the wheels can be turned further. So that the question of whether it’s
understood or not depends on the receptor, not just on what’s projected, and I
think that makes it so complicated. Of course, the other way round is – Ignes
was talking about putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, well that’s the
ideal way of misunderstanding someone, because you think, I’ve put myself in
your position, and you will behave and experience what I do, but you’re a
different person; you know, the mother who hears a baby cry says, I know
what’s wrong with this baby –

IGNES SODRE
But that’s not – sorry, that’s not usually what you mean by, when you’re
listening to your patient you do understand through an identification which
hopefully is not too projective –

JOHN STEINER
Ah, you may, but you may not.

IGNES SODRE
No, but you aim to, or that’s what should be happening.

JOHN STEINER
Oh yes –

IGNES SODRE
It’s not the same thing as you say, “I know how you feel, because I’m…” That’s
a completely different kind of statement.

JOHN STEINER
I’m afraid sometimes we do behave like that.

IGNES SODRE
Well, speak for yourself! [laughter] But what I was going to say seriously is that I
think, because I remember Red, centuries ago, I remember it just being a
complete revelation – I hope I’m not misquoting it – but I remember a
discussion, really in the old institute, when I was sort of starting, and people
were talking about the particular problem, was it being communicated or not,
and what is a communication. And Red said, after several complicated things,

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“Well it’s a communication when you catch it.” I thought, this is brilliant, and very
clear and common sense, but it is true. And you don’t catch it, because of the
nature of the projection. You also don’t catch it, because of the nature of you,
and the particular blind spots, and the particular psychopathological this or that.
But again it’s in the moment to moment, so you may not be able to understand
now, because it touches something, and you may be able to understand a bit
later. But the other thing that I think is terribly important to always think about is,
how much the projective identification is, how much it carries in terms of
aggression, but also how much it’s completely driven by repetition compulsion,
in which case it’s terribly hard not to get caught in it and enact it – and, as we
know, you have to enact it, you have to be able to participate in that process
and so on. But if there is a lot of the personality invested in this sort of stasis, I
think it’s terribly difficult to disentangle yourself and find whatever the point you
have to move away from, and these various meta matters you’re describing,
that actually gives you a little bit of a grip on something else, because
something also, that’s just the sort of thing that projects despair in the analyst,
and makes the analyst therefore less receptive because more fearful of the grip
of this thing. And from the patient’s point of view, the patient may experience
because his life depends on that, you can’t just think about it as entirely
malevolent, it can also be that if there’s a shift they will die, they will kill or they
will disintegrate or something. But nevertheless I think it’s probably not so
much, is it fear or terror or this or that, but this quality of something absolutely
static that repeats and repeats; that’s very powerful.

DEBORAH STEINER
I was rather interested that you mentioned Bion saying something about a bore,
a patient who was so boring, because I was actually thinking about bores and
what is this mechanism? Because I was reminded of, not a patient, but a friend
who [laughter] – perfectly nice friend – who, I remember one occasion where he
was talking to me, really about very interesting things, history and architecture,
and he was very knowledgeable, but it was terribly boring, and I couldn’t
engage with it at all. And going through a whole sort of gamut of emotions, like,
well maybe I’m just not getting it, I’m not listening properly, and then thinking,
I’m a bit guilty because I’m not interested enough, and then getting quite
irritated, feeling I was being pinned down by this boring kind of talk, that I wasn’t
engaged with at all. And I was thinking was it something about this friend (who
is a perfectly nice person) who seemed not to be engaged with me at all, not
with me as a person, or what did I think about it; he seemed totally cut off and in
his own world, and there was something, it reminded me of a sort of normal
autism in a way, that at the same time as talking to people you’re kind of
listening to what is actually coming back to you, in some rather vague way,
you’re kind of tuning into what’s coming back to what you’re saying. And there
was something of that that I thought was very interesting, about when Bion was
talking about this bore, how interesting it is, and what it is that’s lacking.

JOHN STEINER
David Taylor?

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DAVID TAYLOR
Well, just, stimulated by Deb’s comment, and I don’t think I ever talked about
history or architecture [laughter] – I’m sure I didn’t. But linking that also with
David Simpson’s earlier point about how there are strange roots that start to
take place, strange bifurcations in the manner in which individuals develop, and
how they deal with what’s inside them, and the different forms of projective
identification. You were mentioning autism, which I don’t know much about. But
one is struck by this whole range of phenomena, like fetishism for instance,
where a concrete object comes to have some terrific significance, and we often
talk about something being projected into those things; or like some people who
get very attached to inanimate objects, like stones, or particular kinds of object
relations, where – I think we had a Klein Trust conference about them a few
years back – where particular types of objects come to represent something of
enormous significance, and it is somehow fixed in there, in seems crucial, as
Ignes was perhaps saying. And, I don’t know whether it’s linked with that – in
fact I don’t think it is linked with that – but I was always struck with Leslie Sohn’s
notion of an indentificate, and that the difference between an identification,
which seems to be a psychologically real process, and this other one, which is
the formation of an identificate, which seems more constructional; it seems as if
there’s more of some kind of very primitive ego effort to construct a self or to
project oneself into…which may be a very big object or a social role – you see
some people who have no personalities but are all social role. And those sorts
of phenomena seem to me to be in that whole range of different developments
of, out of this common core, with what do individuals do with what’s inside them,
how do they manage it?

EDNA O’SHAUGHNESSY
I’m glad you mentioned Sohn’s notion of the identificate, because I think it goes
back to the question that I think got raised – what is the difference, and is it
something very significant, between introjective identification and projective
identification, and the sequelae that land up in the inner world? And I’ve always
thought too that Sohn’s notion of calling the result of projective identification an
identificate – especially when it takes over the mind and becomes such a
dominant presence within – is a very good way of discriminating the two.

RON BRITTON
Because, since I’ve raised this notion of the acquisitive identification, I’m often
asked what’s the difference between that and introjection? And to me that’s as
simple as saying, how do you dress up? For me, acquisitive projective
identification is getting inside something, so you actually are getting inside the
clothes, and it’s very often done in that way; you’re getting inside and assuming
the identity of the object – you’re not taking it in, as it were. An extreme
example of it, for instance, is the poet Rilke, who writes a novel, which is an
autobiographical novel, of his terrifying childhood really. He used to have a
dressing-up basket, and he used to assume characters and dress up in them,
and then look in the mirror; and he was absolutely terrified on one particular
day, which he describes terribly vividly, because he thought he’d ceased to
exist; he thought that this character that he’d managed to assume, and could

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see in the mirror, existed, but he had ceased to exist. And of course that echoes
a lot of his poetry, if you know his poetry, his great fear that if you fall in love
you lose yourself because, as he put it, you’re like the steam from a hot plate of
soup that goes into the other person and disappears. So that’s a world, I think,
in which this sort of mechanism is dominant, and it’s not at all like taking
something in, it’s disappearing into something, with even the anxiety that you
might totally disappear. And, when we meet it clinically, I think you’ll find that we
are unmoved, it’s a form of projective identification (if it’s taking place with the
patient) in which we are unmoved. Whatever the drama that is brought, and
whatever circumstance which we would expect to resonate with us, doesn’t
resonate. And this notion of, when is normal projective identification missing,
which I think we just heard a good example, I think of it, you see…it’s like
reciting hymns without the music, and it’s like somebody who comes into your
sessions and they recite all these hymns without any music; and so, you hear
the words, and the feelings you would expect to be having are missing. And I
think that’s a very particular clinical situation.

PHIL CROCKATT
Can I just add on to this? Because in terms of this discussion about normal and
abnormal projective identification, isn’t one of the issues that’s implicit in this,
whether somebody – the projector – is in a narcissistic state, that the identificate
in Sohn’s idea is mainly to do with projection. Whereas, whether you call it
introjective identification or acquisitive, there’s something to do with whether
you accurately relate to the object, and so you put yourself in someone else’s
shoes in an accurate way, rather than some sort of more narcissistic way. I was
very interested Ron mentioned Rilke, and without wanting to put an advert for
my own paper in a week’s time, of course Rilke and the whole experience of
falling in love and not existing, I think Ron will probably agree, must be linked to
the fact that Rilke’s mother related to Rilke as a little girl, the little girl that she’d
lost, and named him with this ambiguous feminine name. And Ron’s paper
actually quotes this very moving poem about the mother impacting – poor old
Rilke’s trying to construct his identity, I think, as a little boy, but he’s got this
mother who insists on relating to him as a little girl, which then leads to another
dimension of the whole interaction of projective identification, which I’m looking
at next week, which is: what happens when you get parents who project into
their infants in ways in which the identity of the infant is actually misconstrued,
and the predicament of somebody who’s on the receiving end of…because as
people have said, it’s a means of communication but also a means of
miscommunication and misattribution.

JOHN STEINER
Well I thought, this discussion again suggests two things: one, that it takes time
to understand what’s happening, and I was struck with Ignes describing this
death instinct-driven repetition compulsion, which is just non-understandable
initially, but as it does get repeated, something may at least evolve, and I
thought, that’s one thing that miscommunication can eventually evolve into
something; but the other thing I think Ron was stressing, was that fantasy is
important, and sometimes an identification arises from a fantasy of getting into

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something, sometimes it’s a fantasy of digesting something, they can both be
concrete, but if he can listen to the fantasy it makes a difference what sort of
process is going on.

IGNES SODRE
But isn’t it also that the analyst’s imagination is contributing to that too?
Because each of us will have a different picture anyway, I mean I was thinking
about Ron’s description, of what he imagined about the patient and about Rilke.
But of course, we can go with the main feeling of it, but you might imagine it
more in terms of taking something in, or more in terms of disappearing into the
object, and there are various kinds of disappearing into the object, as there are
various kinds of swallowing the object. I mean, you can be the patient who
completely, like a baby, cannibalistically, swallowed the object, swallowed the
breast completely,– in fact I think Melanie Klein says that in an example, she
says – his body is only a shell, or his mind is only a shell; his body can be the
clothes of the object in a way, so he can feel he’s mostly a breast, vaguely
covered by, you know, his own skin, his own eyes and so on. But the patient
may imagine that, but presumably the patient wouldn’t imagine it that
concretely; you would have to be trying to find a fantasy, and you’d be
contributing your own imagery to this fantasy, and then between the two of you
something is going reasonably well. You might be able to achieve, for that
moment, the picture that seems to be satisfying – at that moment it seems to
have meaning, it seems to represent something. Obviously then it gets lost and
it becomes something else; but it’s two imaginations really, and two fantasies
working together, or working against each other.

JOHN STEINER
Was there someone else? Oh, Sally, I think Sally Weintrobe and then Dave.

SALLY WEINTROBE
I’m finding this discussion absolutely fascinating and very interesting indeed. I
don’t actually know if what I want to say is sufficiently coherent to say, but it was
going back to – my thought was sparked off by David Taylor bringing up stones
and objects, and what we project into them, and the fact that in analysis we’ve
always kept the word 'object' – very wisely we’ve kept that word and – that
…anyway, my mind went on to small children and the fantastic way that they
see meaning, and the animism of small children. You know, you take a little
grandchild on the underground, and they’ll say byebye to the train and, you
know, they’re projecting all over, and it’s extremely difficult for them to work out
what is a human object to project into. You know it made me…what I was
thinking was, is one of the ways that we stop being – well as Piaget said, we
never stop being animistic; when we talk about the weather, you know, the
clouds are moving, we never give it up really. But, is part of our learning what is
animate and inanimate, learning what we can’t project into and what’s not going
to give us anything back? It’s a very very complicated subject. Anyway, it’s not
that I want to say anything coherent about it but I just wanted to add those
thoughts in, about the power of how much we want to communicate with just

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about everything we come across, you know, and the great difficulty we have in
sorting that out really.

JOHN STEINER
I think that’s a very interesting point, don’t you, that it’s an important learning
process: what can you project into and get a response back.

ELIZABETH SPILLIUS
What can’t you!

JOHN STEINER
Yes, or whether a response is delusional, and I think that’s connected with
these situations where some patients seem not to be able to elicit a response.

RON BRITTON
But don’t you think, with stones, and trees and rocks and things, as Wordsworth
put it, describing poor Lucy who is now circulating around the universe along
with the stones and trees and so on, when she’s dead. If we’re going to make a
distinction between animate and inanimate, it just strikes me that to do that, we
have to give up the projective identification that makes inanimate objects
animate – even to recognize a distinction, that there are inanimate objects. So I
think quite a lot of this business, there’s a lot of giving up that has to go along
with some kind of realizing about distinctions, and what is eventually human
and what is not human, and what is mindful and what isn’t mindful. But all of this
does seem to me to require relinquishment, we have to give up our preference
for animating. I’m grateful to Sally, because I think that’s one of the sort of
expressions of a kind of projective identification, that we can pretend anything’s
animate, and we’re very reluctant to give up the teddy bear as a consequence.

JOHN STEINER
Isn’t that also part of poetry, that we do invest things with our fantasies? I’m
struck by, there’s a section where Keats described a sparrow coming onto his
window, and how with every peck on the pane Keats moves forward, moves his
head forward, and so he completely inhabits this sparrow; and yet you
can’t…it’s not psychotic.

RON BRITTON
No, but at least, unlike some of Wordsworth’s examples, the sparrow is alive,
whereas one of his poems begins, ‘There is a rock,’ and he goes on to evoke
the rock as being one of his great companions. So, these distinctions…

SPEAKER (UNKNOWN)
That’s a bit more psychotic. [laughter]

RON BRITTON
As poetic, yes, as A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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DAVID BELL
Two things I want to say, one was that we do seem to be, as far as I’ve
understood it, settling for the idea that the effect on the external object is part of
the definition, is within the definition of projective identification, as opposed to
that being the actualization or the enactment, the second part. But the other
thing I wanted to say – I may not have this quite right – but I think that the
definition in the dictionary of empathy is the capacity to project yourself into
another in order to apprehend their thoughts and feelings. So I think I was
linking a bit with this whole question of curiosity, discovery, imagination. So, if
one imaginatively enters another person, but with the valency of discovery as
opposed to the valency of control, then it is not predetermined what one is
going to discover in the other. Nevertheless, if what one discovers in the other –
and I’m talking here not about actually meeting another person, I’m thinking of
being in one’s room on one’s own, and being able to empathically understand,
say, another person’s state of mind. Of course if you do understand it, what
you’ve brought to it is something within yourself, but because you’ve
understood it or located it within yourself, you’ve recognized or discovered its
presence in the other. So, you obviously cannot discover something in another
mind that you don’t already have acquaintance with. But, I think the difference is
this area that is not predetermined, and it contains imagination, curiosity and
discovery, rather than control and static and determined.

JOHN STEINER
Well surely it’s a process isn’t it? If you want to understand by projective
identification, you’re projecting your own identity into them, which may be right
or may be wrong – you’ve got to then withdraw, and observe, and check, and
then the process goes on again. It seems the danger is with these rigid fixed
things where you think because I’d behave, you know, I’d be angry if it was me;
and it’s not me, so it has to go to and fro, and I think that’s what you’re talking
about: when there’s curiosity there’s a process initiated.

DAVID BELL
I suppose I just wonder whether it should be called projective identification at
all, if that kind of empathic…it seems so different from the other process, that
part of our confusion is we’re using the same word (as you started off by saying)
to discover, to examine things that are very, very different from each other.

JOHN STEINER
Shall we ask the panel to make a final comment?

RON BRITTON
I’d just like to leave a question for everybody to think about and – is it
something to do with what we’ve been talking about, the recent, not-so-recent
now, but it’s a case I’ve described several times, of the man who advertised on
the internet and found somebody who was willing to be eaten, and killed him
and cannibalized him. Now, the story is obviously interesting about him, but
what about the chap who volunteered? And, how does that relate to the sort of
thing we’ve been talking about? What was his great impulse? Because he

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participated, he not only volunteered but he actively participated in the
beginning of the process, starting with his penis being cut off and then cooking
it together. So, is this phenomenon, I mean it’s always puzzled me, so I ask you
to go away and think about it [laughter]; what is the motive for being eaten?

IGNES SODRE
Can somebody now offer a really, really delightful story for us to think about
tonight which is not Ron’s story, please [laughter].

JOHN STEINER
This wasn’t a threat. [laughter]

EDNA O’SHAUGHNESSY
I was just going to say to end with, being now so ancient, I notice all kinds of
trends and two of them would be: tendency to idealise uncertainty, and I would
say, let’s not do that. I do think we can know things, not infallibly, like the Pope,
but we can know them, possibly being mistaken about what we know. And the
other thing is to do with projective identification, that I think we’re all aware that
it has made an enrichment of how we can work and think but, as people have
been saying this evening, it can also be, sort of, used in a trendy way; like,
recently a supervisee comes in and says, ‘I feel so pressured,’ sits down, waits,
as if this is enough – well it’s not! [laughter] Well alright, I’ll leave it at that.

ELIZABETH SPILLIUS
I found this discussion very helpful and very moving too, because I think in a
way we’re all repeating a process that early analysts went through, and
particularly Klein tried to make it explicit; that when you encounter things that
you don’t understand, it’s quite tempting to jump into some system that will
explain it too soon. And she would say to hold off, and not to explain things too
much, to let them be the way they were, and not to fix it, though she quite
admired people at the same time who were trying to conceptualize things, even
if she didn’t agree with it. And finally, in a way, this idea of hers was an attempt
to try and structure something a little bit more, without killing it; because the
problem with trying to structure it too soon is that you are in very great danger
of killing it, and just having a formal idea that has very little meaning. And I think
that she really did her best, and she didn’t have the kind of mind that would
slice things up and make it all clear, and she waited; and this was when the
penny dropped, so to speak, this gave her a bit of a language. And it’s far from
perfect, but it’s the beginning. And it’s interesting that many Americans, when
they read this, they said this is all rubbish!, and they all wanted a new definition
which was their personal one, which was a great deal better than this one – and
something that we all do actually. But how to keep the balance of not being
certain, and just getting muddled on the one hand, and trying to conceptualize
things too much too soon in this very delicate operation – in sessions but also in
trying to conceptualize more generally, what’s analysis about?

JOHN STEINER
Ignes?

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 Melanie Klein Trust

IGNES SODRE
Just going with what Elizabeth is saying, that anything that opens things up
must be a positive thing, and anything that fixes and closes and takes space
away must not be such a great thing. And the other thing is to remember that
the concept is a concept, isn’t it? It’s there to be modified, thought about in
various ways and so on – it’s not a truth, a fact, it’s an idea, isn’t it, that’s to be
filled in and moved about and so on in various ways.

JOHN STEINER
Well thank you very much, I’d like to thank the cast – I was going to say, you’ve
seen the film now read the book [laughter and applause].

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