Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and the Origins of Meaning by Snelling David;

Author:Snelling, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Doing things with words

As Bion’s ideas develop, normal projective identification becomes the basis of empathy; it allows one to identify one’s feelings with those of another. It provides the foundation of all communication which requires understanding of the other and is not mere transmission of information: i.e., of all emotional communication. Abnormal projective identification operates differently in determining the intersubjective field.

Abnormal projective identification is concerned, not with communication but with omnipotent control. This becomes evident in the analytic situation, where the analyst may be aware of feelings toward the patient which are not, strictly speaking, part of the countertransference, part of the analyst’s own emotional response to the patient. The feelings felt by the analyst do not belong to the analyst.

Unlike the scientist the analyst is not merely drawing hypothetical conclusions based upon a rule-governed application of established theory to isolable data which the theory is designed to pick out. An important part of the analyst’s response lies in the countertransference, the analyst’s emotional reaction to the patient. Indeed, epistemic priority is to be given to such relations, as with Heidegger’s conception of the primary disclosiveness of mood, of which they are a special case. They are the primary mode of disclosure of the psychic reality of the situation. The analyst must learn to maintain awareness of such feelings without discharging them in action (e.g. by a spontaneous verbal reaction or by actively ignoring the presence of the feelings). But it became clear to Bion that:

[…] the psychotic patient has a capacity for evoking emotions in the analyst […]. The theory of counter-transferences offers only a partly satisfactory explanation because it is concerned with the manifestation as a symptom of the analyst’s unconscious motives and therefore leaves the patient’s contribution unexplained (Bion 1962b p.24).

Patients resorting to such mechanisms do not intend to communicate with the analyst, but aim rather to control her. The patient’s words and behaviour arouse in the analyst a counterpart to the patient’s tient’s unwanted feelings. This suggests that, although projective identification is a phantasy on the part of the patient, it is also a primitive activity, one which is able in some degree to realise the phantasy; the feelings stirred up in the analyst resemble those which the patient gets rid of in phantasy. This further suggests that, despite its radical divorce from reality-thinking and the secondary processes, phantasy has the task of inducting the subject into the reality of social relationship.

How, then, does unconscious phantasy in such forms give rise to the essentially interpersonal structure of the mind? Let us proceed by making use of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that verbal behaviour is a direct expression of a state of mind rather than evidence for it. Building on the Kleinian insight that primitive mental processes are on display in psychotic behaviour, we can suppose that the psychotic’s verbal productions are, as it were, the natural expression of the states of mind ascribed to the psychotic by the theories we have been looking at. These verbal productions are

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.