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To cite this article: Klaus Roeckerath (2002) Projective Identification: A Neuro-psychoanalytic Perspective,
Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 4:2, 173-181, DOI:
10.1080/15294145.2002.10773395
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15294145.2002.10773395
173
1
I am well aware of the fact that there exist several models for
several phenomena of the human mind. I am referring here to the
overall assumption that the brain and its functions ``produce'' the
human mind in general.
2
I follow the view of Llinas and Ribary (1994) here, who state
that the brain operates in a constructivistic mode, i.e., it constructs
its reality by processing the information it perceives. The outer or
inner stimuli don't act directly on the brain (Freeman, 1995).
Introduction
174
Klaus Roeckerath
projections experiences the feelings generated by
them as alien to him; but he does not do so before
a certain time has passed: most often he is not
aware when the projection actually ``enters'' him.
If one asks how it should be possible to transport
inner feelings, mental or physical states, all of
them highly subjective and therefore unique, into
another human being, even without speaking
about them,3 the process becomes a complicated
matter. How comes the mother actually ``knows''
what the baby experiences, when telepathic
processes are not an option for possible explanations? Bion's term for this was ``reverie'', a state
of subconscious empathy with the child. The same
phenomenon can be seen in daily life and
especially in every analytic hour: ``somehow'' we
(analysts) ``know'' from within about the patient's
intentions. But ``reverie'' does not provide a
model how this transaction is achieved. As brains
construct reality, the receptor must contribute to
this process. I want to focus on the activity taking
place primarily on the object's side of PI.
PI and Theory of Mind
The term ``Theory of Mind'' (Premack and
Woodru, 1978) addresses a cognate problem:
how can we deferby only looking at a person or
a scenewhat this person's state of mind is or
what is happening in a special scenario? BaronCohen's (1995) concept describes especially three
functional units of the psychic apparatus which
seem to be involved in this: the eye-directiondetector (EDD), the shared-attention mechanism
(SAM), and the intentionality detector (ID). The
three modules work together and nally compose
a ``theory'' about how the actual perception of the
outer world, may it be a person or a scene, should
be interpreted. This process, in opposition to PI,
is nearer to consciousness. Nevertheless it seems
reasonable to submit PI under the many processes
with which we gain an ``impression'' of the other's
state of mind. The consequences of an absence of
this ability can be seen in the autistic or
Asperger's syndrome. People with autism cannot
interpret the state of another person's mind, and
thus will behave strange in social situations.4
Now let me present the case material.
3
Even when language is involved it is hardly possible to
convey exactly how one feels. These things belong to the ``qualia'',
the subjective perception of oneself and of the world.
4
Recent research with autists seems to indicate, though, that
the basic capability to decipher another human being's mental state
is not diminished, but that the autist lacks the ability to
operationalize this understanding ``into a functional tool that
would allow him to adjust better to the demands of real-time, reallife social situations . . .'' (Klin et al., 1993).
Mrs. A
Mrs. A is the third of four siblings (sisters +3,
+5, brother 2), and she came to analysis at the
age of 34. She is a lawyer and in a leading position
at a government agency. At the time to be
discussed here she is in treatment for nearly 4
years (4 hrs. per week). When I saw her for the
rst time she complained about various anxieties,
especially to step up in public (which actually was
part of her job); she used to blush easily, and
tended to mistrust people. The relationship with
her now 52 years old friend B, a successful lawyer
himself, bore the sign of suspicion and unjustied
jealousy. At the same time she wished to have a
child with him. The perspective to grow older
without having fullled this wish threatened her.
In this conict she asked for help.
Two perceptions in the rst encounter left a
strong impression on me: her clumsy, kind of
wooden movements, enforced by her height (she's
nearly 1, 90 mtrs) made me feel uncomfortable;
the narrative about her inner states invoked a
similar feeling of clumsiness in me. On the other
hand her sincerity and her readiness to focus
attention on her problems moved me. I understood my hesitance therefore as a mirror of her
ambivalence towards analysis. At the same time
something more seemed to be hidden which could
not become more visible at this moment. We
agreed on an analysis with 4 sessions per week.
As could be expected due to the symptoms
described above, she developed a negative transference, prevailed by mistrust. Working through
these aspects brought forth a highly ambivalent
relationship with her parents. She felt very poorly
acknowledged by them, especially by her mother;
from early times on she had the strong impression
that her siblings found an easier access to her. The
mother pursued her own goals in the rst place,
instead of listening to her children's needs. She
did not refrain from manipulative maneuvers to
dominate the children.
The father had to give up his academic study
due to WW II; he worked hard as a farmer, and
nally advanced to a high position in a ministry.
He suspiciously watched his daughters, especially
during their puberty, when he tended to be violent
at times. So he lurked for them at night on their
way home to see if they were ``alone'' as they had
to promise. In general, he was a reserved man
who seldom spoke.
Mrs. A. was aware of her strong rage and
fantasies of revenge; behind lay a deep sorrow
about an unfullled relationship and a pronounced feeling of being worthless.
Beside this, seemingly out of the blue sky, she
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central lock of his car. In the trunk were fresh
owers, which were about to rot due to the
summery heat. The father was rather desperate.
Only through complicated maneuvers the car
could nally be opened after hours. In this
context the topic of being secluded, inaccessible
and locked in, appeared in numerous variations in
analysis. Nevertheless I did not gain a deeper
understanding of the situation. There was no
image building up inside me about the inner
situation of the patient. I considered this as an
expression of the actual diculty to re-activate
the self-patient-object (Bollas, 1995) inside me.
Obviously I felt more disturbed through her
sudden return than I could become aware of.
Therefore I had an uneasy feeling during the
sessions, as if I remained in her debt for something. A feeling of fear crept on me if I could reestablish contact with her. My counter-transference in this time reectedas I see it todayher
own embarrassment about C: what was going on
inside her; what was going on between us? The
following two sessions took place three weeks
after her return. They were preceded by a
cancellation of an appointment on my behalf in
the week before.
Klaus Roeckerath
I am moved by her emotional outburst.
Suddenly I have the uneasy feeling again to have
failed. I discover myself considering how ``justiable'' her claims are after all. Her approach seems
to upset me. Then I think that she is a lawyer: as if
she wanted to prosecute her demands. I understand my reaction as the result of an attempt to
escape the pressure Mrs. A put on me, because I
feel helpless myself right now. I think it is she who
is upset about the fact that I wasn't accessible in a
situation where she urgently needed to see me.
I say: ``You felt abandoned by me in a
situation which seemed to overwhelm you, and
this upset you.''
Mrs. A does not pick up on this directly but
calms down a bit, and then goes on about B's
plans to expand his enterprise and take up new
activities. This, again, will implicate longer
separations. She understands fully it is inevitable,
but she can't stay relaxed with it. She cannot set
her mind at ease, does not seem to nd an anchor.
At the end of the session an impression of
emptiness, perplexity and loss of perspective
arises in me. It expresses itself in numbness, a
feeling of being cut o from any emotion.
Considerations on the First Session
The Sessions
First Session
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the family moved away from the farm where she
grew up to the city. She was seven years then.
Weeks ahead she felt uncomfortable and had
diculties to sleep. Nothing was said about the
forthcoming removal, neither if it was dicult for
the children to lose the environs they loved, nor if
they had anxieties about what they would be up
to coming to the city. She didn't know at these
times what was the matter with her, but later
thought she might have been sad. Only her
younger brother cried out loud when the day
had nally come. ``But that's how it was most of
the time. Mother didn't understand somehow
when one suered from grief. ``Don't make such a
fuss!'', she used to say. I think I am worried I
could be like her. That's why I'm always looking
so cautiously not to overlook anything.''
During her narrative I see pictures in my
head how she strolled around the farm as a child,
wavering what she should feel and think. This
reminds me of my state of perplexity at the end of
the last session. Because she recalls a whole timespan I think it has been similar to her since the
delivery, maybe even during the whole pregnancy:
An incisive change of life had to be integrated. All
her life she had lacked eective support with this,
and similarly dicult it had been for us in the past
two weeks. Probably also because she feared her
aggression against C and her demands, an
aggression she has to avoid at all costs.
I say: I think the past time has brought up a
lot in you concerning similarly dicult changes in
your life. I suppose there is a lot more to
understand for us, especially as far as your
diculties are concerned to get a clearer picture
about yourself and your intentions.
Mrs. A is completely calm now. C is not
mentioned in the following sessions explicitly.
Instead, numerous memories of her life come up,
which all seem to show basically the same pattern:
an emotional confusion, the frantic search for a
solution, followed by a resigned giving in to the
circumstances, or the counter-movement into
mistrusting and aggressive pseudo-autonomy.
As can be seen from this description it took
me some time until I nally understood Mrs. A on
a more conscious level, and could use this insight
to give an interpretation which opened up again
her inner space to associate freely. How did this
insight came about? Who told me which words to
use in order to convey to her what I thought about
the situation? How did I became conscious of what
was going on at all, i.e., how did I come up with a
concept for interpreting what was the matter?
I am not going to discuss the psychoanalytic
aspects of the case, as it leads in a direction which
is not the purpose of this paper. Rather, I would
Klaus Roeckerath
like to discuss how the interactions between Mrs.
A and me could be seen from a neuroscientic
model of becoming conscious.
Antonio Damasio's Model of the Generation of
Consciousness
Let me introduce here the theory of consciousness
that has recently been proposed by neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio. I will do this as brief as
possible and then focus on a special part of it. I
will have to leave out many important aspects of
his model. In his book ``The feeling of what
happens'' (1999) he describes the role of emotions
as changes of body states in the generation of
consciousness. In a nutshell, he proposes three
stages in the process of generating consciousness.
The rst is the state of the ``proto-self''. It
consists of neural patterns, connected and coherent in time, which continually monitor the actual
state of the body in so called rst order maps. The
proto-self is not conscious.6
Emotions, in Damasio's denition, are basic
bodily changes, inaugurated by stimuli, and
gaining physiological meaning while being processed. They will show in behavior, but don't need
consciousness necessarily. The function of the
proto-self reects, simply spoken, ``being''; it is
not yet sucient for ``being conscious''.
Once this network encounters an objectin
Damasio's terminology an outer object as well as
an inner perceptiontwo things happen at the
same time. First, the object is mapped in the
relevant centers as neural activity, which in turn
alters the activity patterns that map the body state
(the proto-self); second, both events will be
mapped as activity patterns in second order
maps. These maps represent the causal connection between an object and an organism in the
process of change through the interaction with
this object. Mapping this process can become
conscious as a ``feeling'', the subjective notion of
an ongoing emotion. Emotions, in this classication, are not subject of consciousness itself; they
become conscious through generating a feeling.7
6
Nevertheless, the organism on this level is capable to react
adequately to outer or inner stimuli. Comatose patients, for
instance, show reactions to painful stimuli. The fact that they show
mimic patterns on their face that correspond to certain emotions
shows that theydespite being unconsciousare subject to
emotional processes.
7
According to Damasio not all feelings are conscious. As an
example he points out to feelings the origin of which we cannot
determine, but which nevertheless inuence our behaviour. As we
also can become conscious of our feelings, there seems to exist a
third level, namely the level of ``consciousness of feeling''. It is an
open question in psychoanalysis if aects, as a synonym for feeling,
can be unconscious (Shevrin, 2000).
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herself anymore. On the psychic level the experience of ``falling apart'' brought up the ``basic
fault'', as she herself had not found a sucient
containing function in her own mother as a child.
These elements were triggered in her memory
structure through the encounter with C. Unconsciously she re-enacted her own struggle to be
contained, and thus was blocked in containing her
child. We can assume here that indeed her
individual neural network, her organism, was
shaped through her early experiences. The view of
the historical dimension of an organism, embodied in the shape of its neural networks, is covered
by the work of Gerald M. Edelman (1987, 1988,
1989, 1992). Mrs. A reacted to her child according
to her own psychic history, laid down in neural
circuitry. Analysis provided the space for a reenactment of her early experiences by means of
PI, as then she experienced me exactly as
inaccessible as her mother.
How come she could ``manipulate'' me into
an inaccessible mother? We are two separate
individuals with our distinct personal history.
Nevertheless, I ``became'' her mother in a certain
aspect of my reaction to her. From my point of
view, this is the moment where AIBL comes into
play. It is the analyst's task to listen to the
associations of his patient in the rst place. These
associations don't act directly on the analyst's
brain, but are processed according to the very
individuality of the analyst's brain. It invokes
neural modules to ``identify'', in the double sense
of the word, the meaning of what he experiences
with the patient. To experience, in this context,
means an alteration of the proto-self, and in the
ongoing cascade to generate a feeling about what
is encountered. This will be connected with
memories, autobiographical memories, theoretical concepts etc., and thus change the ``ego''
transiently in the process of identication. In
other words, the analyst partly ``becomes'' what
he encounters. In an elegant way Damasio
explains in his model how the generation of
identicatory processes in the autobiographical
self leads itself to a re-enforcement of the coreself: the arising images are by themselves objects
which will be used for another change of the
proto-self, and by this will generate core-consciousness. This circle seems to be the basis on
which we can transiently become someone else,
but are by the very process itself led back to be
ourselves again.
It is an interesting but open question if this
outcome is acquired automatically. The process
of identifying with a projection (PI seen from the
object's side) happens unconsciously. Thus, I
became as insecure and anxious as Mrs. A. In
Klaus Roeckerath
order to ``clarify'' my feelings, i.e., defend myself
against them unconsciously I externalized them at
rst, i.e., I attributed them to the unjustied
demands of Mrs. A, and also tried to get rid of
them by giving her a good advice how to handle
C. Only by realizing that I ``somehow'' acted not
in the usual analytical way I noticed the ``change''
I had undergone. In other words, I no longer
experienced the arising feelings as ``me''. The
``alien'' feelings, although generated by myself via
identicatory processes, discerned themselves
from ``my'' autobiographical background
through reinforcing my core-identity. This led to
a re-establishment of my analytical ``identity'',
acquired through my training, and in the consequence to resume analytic work.
Concluding Remarks
I want to emphasize the point that PI seems to be:
an innate mode of cognition (individual
perspective)
a mode of creating a representation by
identication (intersubjective perspective)
a mode of unconsciously processing certain
feelings (or ``states'') between conspecics
(social perspective).
From the individual's point of view, PI, like
any other sense organ, scans the world with
innate or acquired patterns. The former may be
addressed in psychoanalysis as ``preconceptions''
(Bion, 1989); the latter encompass all unwanted
aspects of the self. It enables the subject to get rid
of them momentarily by attributing (``projecting'') them to an object. Regardless if the object
reacts to the projection in an adequate way (like a
good mother) or inadequately (as I in the case of
Mrs. A), the projecting subject will be altered by
perceiving the object's reaction. The object unto
which is projected will change automatically, i.e.,
unconsciously by identifying with the projections
and thus get to ``know'' something about the
otheralthough this knowledge may remain
completely unconscious.
This leads to a communicative circle by
which feelings, relevant in object relations, are
processed between individuals or groups. In
regard to the topic of ``theory of mind'', PI seems
to be one of the early mechanisms by which an
organism learns something about a conspecic's
state of mind. I think it is underestimated in
psychoanalysis in regard to this normal function
as an unconscious communicative agent in its
individual, intersubjective, and social aspects.
Eventually, by invoking higher functions of
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