Projective Identification and Relatedness: A Kleinian Perspective

Abstract

This paper offers a Kleinian view of the relational understandings described in Mills’s paper regarding two central issues: the exploration of the analyst’s subjectivity by the patient, and the use of self-disclosure. It is suggested that from a Kleinian perspective it is less advisable to “invite” the patient to explore the analyst’s subjectivity, or to use self-disclosure as a curative procedure, because major analytic work focuses on the primitive parts of the personality, that is, the working-through of deep anxieties, massive projective identification, and a deep confusion between self and object. When working with these primitive parts of the personality, the transference relations are suffused with projections, and the patient is therefore unable to address the other’s subjectivity. Furthermore, in these areas of object-relations the patient seldom uses symbolic language but instead suffers from the dominance of symbolic equations, which enforce the delusion of sameness between internal and external objects. Inviting the patient to explore the analyst’s subjectivity, or exposing the patient to otherness through self-disclosure, thus serve as communications to the more adult, saner parts of the patient’s personality, whereas the more psychotic, confused parts that bring about most of his sufferings remain neglected.

Keywords:

• Klein
• projective-identification
• self-disclosure
• subjectivity
• symbolic-equation
• transference

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Merav Roth

Merav Roth, PhD, is clinical psychologist and training psychoanalyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society; chairperson of postgraduate Klein studies and of the PhD unit in the psychotherapy program at the Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University; editor with Joshua Durban of Melanie Klein—Selected Papers Vol. 2, published by Bookworm (2013); and author of the book (in Hebrew) Reading the Reader: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature, published in the Psychoanalysis, Hermeneutics and Culture series edited by Professor Avi Sagi and Dr. Aner Govrin (Jerusalem, Carmel, 2017).