Psyche

Intersubjectivity

His Nurse is the earth.

where is the subject and where is the object?

projective identification is putting some of your psychic stuff into another person's psychic container for both postive (empathic communication) and negative (defense against (psychotic) anxiety) reasons.

quotes from Robert M Young on Benign and Virulent Identification:

'In projective identification parts of the self and internal objects are split off and projected into the external object, which then becomes possessed by, controlled and identified with the projected parts' (Segal, 1973, p. 27).

'Thus the link between patient and analyst, or infant and breast, is the mechanism of projective identification' (Attacks on Linking, Bion, 1967, p. 106).

'container-contained' ... 'an attempt to raise the concept of projective identification to a general theory of human functioning - of the relations between people, and between groups; of the relationships between internal objects; and of the relationships in the symbolic world between thoughts, ideas, theories, experiences, etc.' (Bion, p. 191).

psychoanalysis always contained the seed of intersubjectivity in the relic of the seduction theory. the history of psychoanalysis is its resistance to reality in the form of intersubjective objects. drive theory->ego psychology->object and part-object relations->projective identification->self and self-object psychology->countertransference and therapetuic framework analysis brings us to an extension of intrapsychic processes into external (interpersonal) reality via the hypothesized mechanism of projective identification, only a hundred years or so after The Interpretations of Dreams.

Jessica Benjamin: Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity
Robert Young: Benign and Virulent Identification in Groups and Institutions
Robert M Young: Analytic Space: Countertransference

when everyone is a trauma survivor, and everyone is, no-one is a candidate for (classical) psychoanalysis.

Bloom extends primative unconscious projective identification as a response to trauma to small and large groups, including nations.

"Victims of traumatic experiences also become REENACTORS, but their reenactments are unconscious, not conscious. They follow a script originally written by someone - or something - else, a script that is difficult to amend or edit, largely because it is nonverbal and unknown. Traumatic reenactment has been defined as living in the unremembered past."

Sandra Bloom: Every Time History Repeats Itself the Price Goes Up: The Social Reenactment of Trauma

“Nine A’s of Trauma”: attachment, affect, aggression, authority, awareness, addiction,automaticity, avoidance, alienation.

Posted by psyche at June 22, 2003 03:42 PM