投射性认同的三次转向：内涵演变与概念比较

投射性认同发端自Freud的投射概念, 后由Klein正式提出, 经过Bion, Resenfeld, Grotstein等人的发展, 已经成为精神分析的核心概念之一。其内涵演变经历了从单向投射到双向互动, 从内心幻想到现实交流, 从母婴关系到咨访关系的三次重要转向。投射性认同较投射而言是一种更成熟复杂的防御机制, 与移情的差异则体现在起因、内容和结果等方面。近年来, 神经精神分析的兴起与镜像神经元的发现为理解投射性认同的发生机制提供了神经生物学的基础。     

The Priest and the Rabbi Meet in a Bar: The Dialectic between Merger and Recoil in Psychoanalysis

The tension between union and separation is a leitmotif in all social relations and cuts a swath across psychoanalytic theories. I am proposing that the interplay, between merger and recoil is an oscillating and enduring rhythm throughout the life cycle and characterizes an ongoing pattern in relatedness. Awareness of this repetitive cadence in the transference/countertransference as a reflection of the human drama can alert the analyst to a pattern that prompts clinical interventions and expands the potential of deepening the dyadic relationship and its mutative effects.     

Self-Disclosure and Vulnerability

Abstract

Based on the theoretical assumption and clinical observation that projective identification is a natural, constant element in human psychology, clinical material is used to illustrate how projective identification centered transference states create situations where acting out of the patient's phantasies and conflicts by both patient and therapist is both common and unavoidable. Because they are more obvious, some forms of projective identification encountered in clinical practice are easier for the analyst to notice and interpret. Other forms are more subtle and therefore difficult to figure out. Finally, some forms, whether subtle or obvious, seem to create a stronger pull on the analyst to blindly act out.

In some psychoanalytic treatments, one form of projective identification might embody the core transference. In other cases, the patient might shift or evolve from one level of this mechanism to another. Some patients attempt to permanently discharge their projective anxiety, phantasy, or conflict into the analyst. There is a patent resistance to re-own, examine, or recognize this projection. Some of these patients are narcissistic in functioning, others are borderline, and many attempt to find refuge behind a psychic barricade or retreat (Steiner 1993). In other forms of projective identification, the patient enlists the analyst to master their internal struggles for them. This occurs through the combination of interpersonal and intra-psychic object relational dynamics. This “do my dirty work for me” approach within the transference can evoke various degrees of counter-transference enactments and transference/counter-transference acting out.

Another form of projective identification, common in the clinical setting, is when a patient wants to expand the way of relating internally, but is convinced the analyst needs to validate or coach the patient along. This is why such a patient may stimulate transference/counter-transference tests and conduct practice runs of new object relational phantasies within the therapeutic relationship. Over and over, the patient may gently engage the analyst in a test, to see if it is ok to change their core view of reality. Depending on how the analyst reacts or interprets, the patient may feel encouraged to or discouraged from continuing the new method of relating to self and object. The patient's view of the analyst's reactions is, of course, distorted by transference phantasies, so the analyst must be careful to investigate the patient's reasoning and feelings about the so-called encouragement or discouragement. This does not negate the possible counter-transference by the analyst in which he or she may indeed be seduced into becoming a discouraging or encouraging parental figure who actually voices suggestions and judgment.

All these forms of projective identification surface with patients across the diagnostic spectrum, from higher functioning depressive persons to those who are more disturbed paranoid-schizoid cases. Whether immediately obvious or more submerged in the therapeutic relationship, projective identification almost always leads to some degree of acting out on the part of the analyst. Therefore, it is critical to monitor or use the analyst's counter-transference as a map towards understanding the patient's phantasies and conflicts that push them to engage in a particular form of projective identification.     

2. Seminars with Executives on Human Relations in the United States Government

Abstract

The feeling of shame is very difficult to recognize, to reveal, to face, and to work through. Starting with some expressions of human aggression, the authors underline the difference in treating feelings of guilt and feelings of shame. The authors detail the elaboration of shame in group psychotherapy with released prisoners of war and with war veterans and review important analytic theoretical concepts of shame, projective identification, empathy, and countertransference. They examine the importance of unlocking and identifying the silent shame, as well as the mourning process essential to working through the burden of catastrophic shame. Special counter transference problems with PTSD patients are analyzed.     

Empathy: From Mind Reading to the Reading of a Distant Text

In the psychoanalytic literature empathy is commonly discussed as a form of “mind reading”, which is deeply associated with the capacity to mirror the other’s mental state. In this paper, I propose an alternative perspective on empathy as the process of reading a distant text. This perspective is illustrated through a Talmudic story and by weaving a thread between Bakhtin, Bion and Lacan. The paper concludes by pointing to the danger of empathy as a hidden form of projective identification that provides the reader with a false sense of control rather than with negative capability for otherness.     

Basic Considerations in the Application of Therapy and Education to Parent Groups

This article presents a couples group therapy treatment approach that uses analytic object relations concepts such as transference/countertransference, projective identification, containment, and the holding environment. Object relations theory is seen as the most useful theory with which to view couple interaction because it is based on a two-person psychology and focuses on the impact of relational systems on the development of the person. This includes the idea that the person grows within the attachment to another person. Group therapy is seen as a more effective treatment approach because the group is a resilient holding environment that provides an avenue in which projective identifications can be understood and contained, power can be redefined, isolation of the couple can be decreased, and the couple's responses can become more versatile. The model described is illustrated with clinical vignettes from an open-ended couples group.     

Paternal empathy in the transference/countertransference relationship

This paper explores the process of paternal empathy within the context of the transference and countertransference relationship. The masculine and feminine elements of paternal responsiveness are described with implications for therapeutic resonance and mirroring. Case material illustrates the author's thesis.     

The Development of an Analytic Perspective in the Group Leader: Some Basic Thoughts

Previous experience working with individuals on a one-to-one basis along with previous analytic therapy are important prerequisites for analytic group training. Training must emphasize understanding of group-as-a-whole processes, such as basic assumption life, complex transference manifestations, as well as awareness of one's countertransference toward individuals, subgroups and the group-as-a-whole. Specific concepts derived from object-relations theory such as projective identification are crucial to master. Personal analytic group therapy is recommended.     

Who Is the Sufferer and What Is Being Suffered? Subjectivity in Times of Social Malaise

This paper encourages clinicians to consider how patients’ conflicts and symptoms reveal not only familial etiology but the internalization of hegemonic structures and ideology. It explores how the subject evolves within the cultural matrix of neoliberalism, the contemporary hegemonic system that shapes unconscious fantasy, conflicts and defenses. Several clinical case vignettes illustrate the benefits to both analyst and patient of exploring within the transference and countertransference how neoliberal hierarchical arrangements of class, race and gender affect subjective and intersubjective experience.     

Toward Development of a Projective Set

An exploration of the possibility of developing a projective set in a client that will allow for lowering of his defenses and thus possibly eliciting “richer projective materials.” A “anxious tension” set was produced in one group of Ss by means of an intelligence type test and “playful tension” was produced in another group by means of a fantasy task. A projective technique (Part A of the Rosenzweig F-Battery) was then given to both groups. The results indicate that this projective technique was taken at a more implicit (or deeper) level following the “playful tension” than following the “anxious tension.” Implications for the pre-test environment of projective techniques are given.     

A Picture Book of Internal Events: The Colours of Rage and Love

The views on countertransference in psychoanalytic theory and practice have undergone a change within the last fifty years. From being considered an impediment to analysis, countertransference is today looked upon as an important potential for a tentative understanding of what is unconsciously communicated from the analysand to the analyst. This implies that the analyst is susceptible to the unconscious interaction in the transference and the countertransference, and that he/she becomes conscious as quickly as possible of what is taking place. This applies especially to erotic feelings which are often intensified in analyses with patients with a serious psychopathology, as well as in analyses with patients in regressive phases where projective identification is the dominant factor used as a defence and a communication. Opinions differ as regards the question of how to deal with such a situation, especially whether it is right to be candid about the analyst's countertransference feelings towards the analysand, something most would caution against. In an example from an analysis, the analyst describes how he was influenced by an unconscious erotic countertransference. After three years of therapy with a patient with a serious psychopathology, he developed ?motherly” feelings, which he interpreted as reflecting a child's longing for closeness and physical contact. The result was that a few times, he ?forgot” to indicate the end of the session, which was then prolonged, and also that he embraced her on several occasions before she left the session. One year later, he had intense sexual fantasies and dreams about the analysand, which he experienced as both enticing and alarming, and as an impediment to the analysis. He soon became aware of the element of projective identification in the interaction, and by interpreting the analysand's unconscious communication, he regained his ability to maintain an analytic attitude and clear boundaries.     

Reply to my Critics

In response to critical discussion of my book, A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion, I clarify and develop various aspects of my analysis of jealousy in particular and affectivity in general. In relation to jealousy, I explore the nature of pathology, the role of fantasy and of the rival, and the place of examples and of evolutionary theory. In relation to affectivity, I emphasize the difference between distinguishing emotions from other psychological states and distinguishing among, within and between, particular emotions (where affectivity may not be central). In addition, I emphasize the dangers of a version of G.E. Moore's error in demanding a nonreductive analysis of good in parallel demands for a nonreductive analysis of affectivity.     

Effects of cooperative learning on peer relations,empathy, and bullying in middle school

Although researchers have developed prevention programs to reduce bullying, the results are mixed, and this may be due to a degree of uncertainty in their theoretical foundation. In particular, these programs share an emphasis on empathy as a personal attribute that can be enhanced among students through the application of specific curricula that will, in turn, contribute to a reduction in bullying behavior. However, the link between empathy and bullying is unclear, as is the ability of bullying prevention programs to actually impact student empathy. In this study, we used a cluster randomized trial (N = 15 middle schools, 1,890 students, 47.1% female, 75.2% White) to evaluate the impact of cooperative learning on bullying, and we evaluated whether these effects were mediated by empathy and peer relatedness. Our results indicated that cooperative learning can significantly reduce bullying, and that some of this effect is transmitted via enhancements to affective empathy. Cooperative learning also demonstrated significant positive effects on cognitive empathy, but this did not have an effect on bullying. We also found that the effects of cooperative learning on cognitive and affective empathy were mediated by improvements in peer relatedness. These findings add a degree of clarity to the literature, and also represent the first time, as far as we are aware, that an antibullying program has been found to have significant effects on both cognitive and affective empathy.     

Projective identification in Othello and Verdi's Otello

In this paper I explore how projective identification is depicted in Shakespeare's Othello (1603–4 [2006]) and in Verdi's Otello (1887). Both the play and the opera can be seen as studies in projection – in the evacuation into others of feelings that the subject finds unbearable, such as envious and jealous exclusion or unbearable sexual excitement. The essential issue is the same in both the play and the opera, which is that the very sight of love between Othello and Desdemona, or of contentment in anyone's mind, drives Iago mad with envy and jealousy, which he has to expel and project into others, particularly into Othello, who is susceptible to this attack because of his own narcissistic vulnerability. I take two episodes, which appear in both the play and the opera, to explore in detail how projective identification is represented both verbally and musically. I suggest that music, and words used musically, are particularly suited to conveying complex inter‐ and intra‐personal processes such as projective identification.     

Whose Disgust Is It Anyway?: Projection and Projective Identification in the Couple Relationship

In this commentary on Josephs’s paper on Oedipal disgust, I emphasize that disgust is best viewed as a symptom of an interpersonal dynamic that may reflect a range of underlying unconscious issues beyond threats to attachment. Disgust, like all affective experience, doesn’t only arise in response to interpersonal experience; it is also created interpersonally through projection and projective identification. In my view, disgust signals a breakdown, a failure in the couple’s capacity to engage in the communicative processes essential to all intimate relationships for negotiating the fragile balances between separation and merger, love and hate, creativity and destruction.     

Fantasy,defense, and the representational world

This paper discusses the manipulation of mental representations, particularly in relation to the psychoanalytic concepts of conscious or unconscious fantasy. A distinction is made between the unconscious phenomenal (experiential) aspect of representations and the nonexperiential, quasi-structural aspect. The concept of the representational world is described and elaborated, and its development is seen as a consequence of the infant's interaction with itself and the external world. Processes such as identification and projection can be seen in terms of changes in self and object representations, and the same is true for all the mechanisms of defense. The content of unconscious wishes is transformed, by use of such mechanisms, into representations that are acceptable to consciousness. Major transformations of unconscious representational content occur in the process of creating unconscious (preconscious) fantasy, and further transformations are frequently needed before such (preconscious) fantasies are permitted access to consciousness. The concept of projective identification is considered in the light of the ideas put forward in the paper.     

Mirror Neurons,Embodied Simulation,and the Neural Basis of Social Identification

The shared intersubjective space in which we live since birth enables and bootstraps the constitution of the sense of identity we normally entertain with others. Social identification incorporates the domains of action, sensations, affect, and emotions and is underpinned by the activation of shared neural circuits. A common underlying functional mechanism—embodied simulation—mediates our capacity to share the meaning of actions, intentions, feelings, and emotions with others, thus grounding our identification with and connectedness to others. Social identification, empathy, and “we-ness” are the basic ground of our development and being. Embodied simulation provides a model of potential interest not only for our understanding of how interpersonal relations work or might be pathologically disturbed but also for psychoanalysis. The hypothesis is that embodied simulation is at work within the psychoanalytic setting between patient and analyst. The notions of projective identification and the interpersonal dynamic related to transference and countertransference can be viewed as instantiations of the implicit and prelinguistic mechanisms of the embodied simulation-driven mirroring mechanisms here reviewed.     

Conceptualizations of Personality Disorders with the Five Factor Model-count and Empathy Traits

Previous research has long advocated that emotional and behavioral disorders are related to general personality traits, such as the Five Factor Model (FFM). The addition of section III in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) recommends that extremity in personality traits together with maladaptive interpersonal functioning, such as lack of empathy, are used for identifying psychopathology and particularly personality disorders (PD). The objective of the present study was to measure dispositions for DSM categories based on normal personality continuums, and to conceptualize these with empathy traits. We used a validated FFM-count method based on the five personality factors (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness), and related these to 4 empathy traits (emphatic concern, perspective-taking, fantasy, and personal distress). The results showed that FFM-based PD scores overall could be conceptualized using only two of the empathy traits, low emphatic concern and high personal distress. Further, specific dispositions for personality disorders were characterized with distinct empathy traits (e.g., histrionic with high fantasy, and paranoid with low perspective-taking). These findings may have both theoretical and practical implications in capturing potential for personality disorders with ease and efficiency.     

Coupling Longitudinal Data and Multilevel Modeling to Examine the Antecedents and Consequences of Jealousy Experiences in Romantic Relationships: A Test of the Relational Turbulence Model

We used longitudinal data and multilevel modeling to examine how intimacy, relational uncertainty, and failed attempts at interdependence influence emotional, cognitive, and communicative responses to romantic jealousy, and how those experiences shape subsequent relationship characteristics. The relational turbulence model ( Solomon & Knobloch, 2004 ) highlights how intimacy, relational uncertainty, and interference from partners influence and reflect reactions to events that occur within romantic relationships. Drawing from the theory, we predicted that (a) relational uncertainty and interference from partners are positively associated with cognitive and emotional jealousies; (b) the intensity of romantic jealousy, relational intimacy, and a partner’s interference is positively associated with the directness of communication about jealousy; (c) relational uncertainty is negatively associated with communicative directness; and (d) cognitive jealousy, emotional jealousy, and the directness of communicative responses to jealousy influence subsequent relationship characteristics. The results of the multilevel modeling revealed mixed support for our predictions. We explore the implications of this study for research on the relational turbulence model, relationship development, and jealousy.