127: Projective Identification Part I feat. Brian Ngo-Smith

There's so many like verbs that occur to me when I think about projective identification. Parasite does not a verb, but like a parasite like burrows inside you. Like there's like incursions. There's, I mean, we're going to get to like the idea of projection, introduction, like, all, but like, yeah, this is not true about verbs. I guess I was talking about nouns, whatever. There's a word that this whole episode is going to be about slippage between categories. So that's fine. We'll go with it. But it's something about like invasion, you know? I mean, we can think about like being a container, being a receptacle. But that means you have to contain something. There's a certain kind of like intolerableness to the experience, I think, sometimes. Like, I mean, I think that's the kind of projective identification. I was going through a book that I think is really four clinicians, but that, you know, the Nancy McWilliams psychoanalytic diagnosis, which is one of those books where it's just like, why have I not like just been reading this every day for all of my life? It's so scary. And there's this line about like how this is like, projective identification is like known for giving a head. A particular kind of headache to clinicians. And it's like, I was thinking about this as a nonclinician, just as a person, you know, who works with other people in settings that often include like extreme emotion. And it was just like, if only it were just a headache and not that feeling of being taken over. I mean, you think of like the act, yeah, occupied, but you think of like the exorcist. And and and also just the sense of like, it's so contrary to like modern, like this is all air quotes modern western conceptions of the boundaries between people is the idea is that no one can actually make you feel a thing. I was even thinking about that, that old line like, what is it? The Eleno Roosevelt line like no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. And I was like, have you ever met a person? Yeah, right. Like they can make you feel inferior and like so many much more upsetting things. Well, and the idea consent sort of flies in the face of the idea of the unconscious. Yes. I think the possession analogy is striking. I was looking at some secondary historical literature, like tracing the pre histories of projective identification. And part of it got into like 19th century spiritualism, parapsychology stuff, and this idea of like transferring a thought into the other person and sort of mesmerist kind of operations or say ounces. It in a way that is both like spooky in experience, but also I think sometimes activates like a skepticism or even a desire to like not not seem like you're trying to excuse yourself for something. Right. You made me feel this is isn't on me really it is a domain concept and a set of experiences, I think that are so can be really disquieting. And just to again, to be very candid and own my difficulty concept, what this concept, I think you're first unpack it, but also like my experiential thing with this is that I can't be in a room with people who amote in certain types of ways. Right. And it's not it's not I don't think you pay me enough like I literally pick up on certain types of anxiety and aggression. And I think in ways where I just feel like I am not just like responsible for it and that I think is a more higher level sort of thing, but more just like my skin starts to crawl or I feel like I'm going to jump out of myself and it the mental image I have here to my possession thing is coming to mind is like in all those horror movies when someone shows up like the kids shows up after I've been in the basement or the long lost relative appears on the porch. And the family seems to think it's all okay except there's like one dog that's like barking at them or pissing itself like that's like how I feel in the face of like subtle bits right or like knowing that this could be someone who is not just like experiencing in that space or state, but is trying also to communicate. Yeah, consciously and otherwise it really maybe it's because like my sense of like stability itself is harder one or not as integrated I'm not sure but it reflects something in me that is well yeah, yeah, I mean it's paranoid a genic I think it induces a kind of a skeezoid splitting in one oneself where they're the fear of being taken over sort of overrides any sense of groundedness. And I mean I think that's the challenge and the artistry of clinical work of surrendering to that on the one hand and remaining cohesive and clear about oneself on the other with varying degrees of success. You're listening to ordinary unhappiness a podcast about psychoanalysis politics pop culture and the ways we suffer now I'm Abby Cleachon I'm Patrick Landfield and today I am so delighted to welcome back to the show Brian go Smith Brian is a psychoanalyst and clinical social worker in private practice in Denver, Colorado where he is also on faculty at the Denver Institute for psychoanalysis. He has worked in the mental health field for over 20 years in residential psychiatric hospital and community mental health settings Brian is a past president of the American Association for psychoanalysis and clinical social work and he was the recipient of the 2024 Ernst and Gertrude Tico Memorial Award from the American psychoanalytic association. Listeners will also remember Brian from one of actually it's it's been like an all time favorite episode for so many of our listeners the episode we did with you most two years ago now Brian yeah talking about your remarkable essay this couch has bed bugs on the psychoanalysis of homelessness and the homelessness of psychoanalysis we still get messages about that episode we are so delighted and couldn't think of a better interlocutor to be here for not one but a little mini series on projective identification Brian welcome back we're so happy that you're here. Well thank you for having me and I think I might be the right subject because I rely on projective phenomenon in my personal life so much and will be using lots of examples from my marriage honestly thank god I could be out of the I mean I'm obviously glad that you're I presume your marriage is thriving I hope nothing but the best for that it's true now I think I meant that as a sort of level the playing field that everyone uses. Everyone uses these what they want to or not get that straight out of the way yeah no I'm really glad you're saying that because also to it what you're immediately saying there and I want to flag this for the audience is that this is a on the one hand to very complicated really complicated concept that pushes on our understandings of self and other of our own self awareness and agency about how much we like authentically if we want to use that language can really. To one another like where are feelings come from all these things and has all these ethical and other concerns to and that ramifies us will talk about the subsequent episode institutionally but also that it's the term does name something that is real and those complications capture situations that are intense and complicated and oftentimes exemplarily in intimate relationships and not just in the clinical context so I just as people are listening to this and may find themselves. Struggling will deal with struggles with vocabulary or thinking through sort of the theoretical models I am just so glad that you're here with us in your capacity as a clinician and someone who just thinks in these terms more broadly to elucidate all the stakes of this I'm really glad to be here on that note i'm going to take a stab at pitching a framework or at least leveling a playing field for thinking about projective identification that hopefully whoever is listening to this no matter their background or terminological sophistication can find some way in yeah absolutely we should stipulate this is a complicated concept we're going to try to do justice to it but it's going to demand I mean for from us, but also even more from you, the listener, a certain amount of patience as we kind of come at it from a bunch of angles, because it is one of those things that, well, and I'll say this just as somebody who, you know, occupational hazard tends to think sort of abstractly, it's hard to get a handle on abstractly. But then once you've done that, sometimes then the example still kind of skitter out of your reach. And if you start with the examples, then the sort of broader abstraction of it can do the same. So we need to kind of tackle it on a bunch of friends. And I think what you're doing Patrick is going to just sort of sketch out a little bit of like, what even is this as a phenomenon? And even to follow up on what you're saying, Abby, right? And this I think is a handle the people who have been listening to us like to think in these terms may find useful. Elucidating the particular stakes and contours of this term, projective identification requires thinking analogically, right? It requires thinking a little bit about theories of like the development of the subject. It's like, lineologically, it requires thinking a little bit about certain types of behaviors that we might call pathological or certain types of situations that we might describe as ones of acute mental distress. It also requires us thinking about clinical phenomena like things that happen in that particular space of psychodynamic or psychoanalytic psychotherapy and then eventually two to groups. And I think the bid that we want to make to everyone listening to this is to one think analogically and try and perceive these kind of patterns because a lot of the story of projective identification is people elaborating or exploring certain themes in these different domains historically speaking, right? Expanding understanding development and working with different types of patients and thinking about different types of pathologies leads to a more robust and then different versions of this concept. But also to try and not think about projective identification or even any of the other sort of building block concepts that we'll work through to get there, namely like the idea of defense mechanisms or projection, etc. as narrowly being normative or stigmatizing or even pathological, right? Just to broadly think about these as ways in which the psyche is consolidated or comes apart and ways in which like the psyche expresses itself or we express ourselves to one another and that even as we may want to think about how by analogy some stuff that maybe developmental maybe reflected in certain pathological states and things that are clinical and maybe related to things that are more quittity and and work a day in our organizational or intimate lives, that the effort here is trying to be descriptive, right? To think about stuff in terms of a spectrum and in terms of how these are things in your on-thing of this defense mechanism specifically, it just manifests as part of maybe normal development at different times but also just in everyday life. So my quick stab here then to say this, right, is that the term projective identification has two words in it, namely this idea of a projection, right? Which we can understand as a defense mechanism. It's a whole way that the ego or this psyche more broadly deals with stuff that is felt to be a threat from it inside or outside, right? And of which it's one of many we can name other defense mechanisms and I suspect we will, right? Like denial or somatization or any of these other ways in which something noxious or bothersome is pushed outwards and that's sort of a metaphor to track analogically. And then identification which is another sort of psychic operation of finding congruence with or attuning yourself towards or framing your own being in relation to something, right? But that the paradox of this term is that projective identification, when you put those two things together, it's not quite the sum of its parts and it means something a little bit more and less than that at the same time. So it's not like literally a projection of identification, right? Because we might think like identification is something I project anyways, right? I identify this person as being xyz or identify with I identify myself with this other, right? And these are all sort of like me putting something on somebody else. But rather what I think we could do is think about this in terms of like, it's like the broader philosophical or even like existential stakes of like the defense mechanisms or projection or identification more generally, namely like, what does it take? Limitantly, psychically. And how does it happen over time that we get a sense of a stable sense of self, of right? If we get that of like an ownership of our feelings versus desire not to relate to certain other feelings or things. In other words, like even on the level of like, how do we determine what's inside us or outside us? Harder than it might initially seem. Yeah. Well, and I think this is where the concept, you know, not only has it evolved in terms of where it began and maybe we'll back up and think about projection first and then kind of move into where a client comes in. But even how client was making use of the of the concept is quite different in my reading at least from how most people are thinking about it nowadays clinically. To say nothing of where beyond fits into that, we'll get there too, I'm sure. But right, it's this sort of differentiating between inside and outside. So there's controversy even within the term like, can there be an identification for an infant who has yet to just differentiate between self and an object. And this is where the sort of the anaphyroidians and the clineans split from one another quite famously, you know, but maybe, I mean, I'm just thinking of starting with Sigmund. And I think that this is coming from the Laplandche-Pontolide dictionary that says, although Freud recognizes projection in rather diverse areas, he assigns it a fairly strict meaning. It always appears as a defense as the attribution to another person or thing of qualities, feelings or wishes that the subject repudiates or refuses to recognize in himself. And so then I guess the kind of the split occurs around this question of whether the operation of projection and interjection presupposes the sort of differentiation between inside and outside or if it constitutes it. And this is, you know, the anaphyroidians say it has to presuppose it. You can't be doing this move if there's no differentiation between inside and outside. And the clineans say that actually this phenomenon constitutes the differentiation between inside and outside. I wonder if one way we can kind of just loosely square that circle for the purposes of our herristics. Not for the purposes of solving this argument. Yeah. Is just to, particularly for people who are thinking about this for the first time, just sort of sit with the idea that whether it's a one off thing that has to happen in a particular sequence or it's a thing that, you know, can take a whole different sort of developmental pathway. That boundary between self and other between inside and outside is not given. It emerges over time and it takes work. There's an expenditure there. It's a structure, but even as I think the client mentions in the essay that we read for a day, like think about the structures like little fish on the bottom of the sea, right, where they have to exist in a certain type of pressure. And their structure is just as much a pushing outward against the crippling weight of water on them as it is a sort of like a, say, an atomized or fight at the museum. So like that, I guess what I want us to think is almost dialectically or dynamically or really almost the question open. At least for now, somehow the way the self is set up or the way that the self begins to experience itself as a whole always already inevitably has to involve some sort of relation to the not self in this kind of bootstrapping operation that's demanding. Like Brian said, like this terminology is shifting. The way that folks talk about productive identification now is not the same or not identical to how it appears in Klein who originates it. And I think at the risk of like going like one step forward, two steps back because I want to make sure we do get to walk through more carefully some of the ground that Patrick just covered in terms of like what's projection. What's identification? What's projective identification? And also how to what does that have to do with this other term that's not yet in the mix, which is interjection? I want to suggest the following because I want to give people who are listening Those who are not clinicians and who have not unlike us spent the last What is it that you said Patrick the other day because this is this is coming out a little while after after Thanksgiving But yesterday was Thanksgiving and you're like we're just reading about projective identification instead of enacting it with our families But I think it would be I Think it would be really good Perhaps for the sake of people getting at least a tentative handle on it from some of the ways each of us have learned to talk about it or think about it Both in terms of like you know are there texts that have helped you get a handle on it? Are there examples maybe we could kind of throw a few of those out and let them kind of accumulate and resonate and then go backwards into All like being really precise about all of those terms. How do you feel about that? Yeah, that's sensible to me. In that case I'm gonna bring in a definition Which also happens to be This is probably like the least the the text that I might my people can't see me but my desk is like completely covered But books right now for for this episode I'm gonna bring in the the text that I consulted that was the least like Properly within like a psychoanalytic canon But it's the way that I first came to learn about projective identification in a way that made sense to me Which is Teresa Brennan's book the transmission of affect which came out in 2004 It was published posthumously and in in part because Teresa Brennan died tragically While while writing this but it's one of the it's it's from that period when there was a major trend in Certain parts of the humanities towards what we call affect theory And most of affect theory had nothing to do a psychoanalysis, but Teresa Brennan was like Oh, you got to get into Klein you got to get into beyond And this book famously starts with her Trying to appeal to people who might not feel any sympathy Towards the idea that someone else can make you feel a feeling By appealing to the very work-ad-example That's something like has you know, is there anyone among us? I'm I'm not quoting this directly It's but it's something is there is there anyone among us who has not walked into a room and felt the atmosphere Right, you know, it's like oh your parents were fighting right or like somebody was just having sex Like there's like all sorts of happy feelings and these I mean if it was happy sex, I guess You know, there's there's a you know, but this is like a very common experience And she goes on and to talk about how we have this profound resistance To the idea that emotions are anything other than hours right that they're communicable And she goes on to give what I what I found to be such a good helpful And it's it's really comes from Klein, but you can tell that beyond is the person that she's really drawing on you know great definition Which I think is going to give people especially people who already have a sense of like oh, I know what projection means Which I think is a much more generally used term like colloquially than projected identification Okay, so she says very very pithily A projection is what I disown in myself and see in you A projective identification is what I succeed in having you experience in yourself Although it comes from me in the first place So that's very nice and then she gives one quick example afterward which which I'm gonna um and it's sort of low stakes Also, so I'm going to to continue with it She says for example with my projection I may see you as unimaginative To avoid feeling that way myself Although somewhere I probably do With my projective identification you actually feel unimaginative While I do not Good isn't that good? My example of encountering it Apart from in the text that we all read today together And which I still struggle with after I've read them 20 years ago and they're still very hard It comes from my memories of doing analytic training and having colleagues Who I knew very well as people right? I knew what their styles were I knew what they would or wouldn't say like who would be I'd go to this person for that or I go to that person for this and I I had a sense in other words of what their character was To be sent to which we can ever know that but that They would sometimes and not just in case conferences but like literally just You know overbears or something or at the end of a long week or generally two drinks in Or even sometimes like they'd call you and they'd be upset. I'm not I'm not talking about like violating confidential I'm just talking about them like being overwhelmed by an experience that's of something that had happened when they were working with a patient and There was some sort of outburst from them Or they suddenly like I don't I can't believe I said this or I I keep having recurrent thoughts about hitting my patient with a clipboard and meanwhile there she is on the count And she's so petite and she's been so abused and how what's going on with this right and sometimes When you get more details about this in the like clinical case Sort of consults will be narrating it Sometimes have things that are these stories that would kind of remind me of how I don't know if anyone's been in relationships that have these kind of dynamics where it's like The patient would be all you're gonna get angry at man. No, you're gonna get angry It's only a matter of time before you get angry I mean they start mumbling more and more and more and the and the doctor is like no, no I'm not gonna get angry with you. I'm not gonna get angry at you and and the person is just like saying this And finally the things like the doctor's just like would you please speak the fuck up? I cannot hear you and then suddenly the patient the the doctor is angry and the patient somehow seems gratified by that. That's right. It well it gratifies the omnipotent Wish to be able to control the other yeah And and part of what was so disruptive And it was a strange then have more senior analyst but no, that's that's part of how this is supposed to work Like you just learn something about this person right or you thought you broke the frame. Maybe you didn't but but that so the way I encountered it were And please I already made the caveats about not not making this like excusing behavior because I think Be what you do and what you enact versus what you feel is this thing that Therapists probably have to be better than than average folks are doing but but all the same was the regularity with which people who I I knew their character and I knew that they kept an even keel would suddenly find themselves Describing themselves as having done something that everyone Who knew that we like that's out of character and that would be will bewildering even for them Well, and I think that's the the challenge in the clinical situation of as an old supervisor said you know wearing the hat that the patient hands to you That you know and this is where some of these concepts I don't know fortunately or unfortunately all I mean like like the idea of transference Uh is different than projection But they're sort of operating in the same kind of neighborhood, you know Of something being ascribed to you. Let's say you the analyst or the therapist that Doesn't necessarily feel like it belongs to you. Although sometimes it it does and that's the other component I think of the identification side of projective identification is Sometimes the thing that's being projected into you is quite Concordant with your own self conception And uh and sometimes it isn't sometimes it's quite discordant And in the scenarios in which it's quite discordant it can lead to a Quasite breakdown or even like a form of illness As opposed to really running with the identification and feeling quite You know fine with it like when somebody projects in the The idea that you know being quite confident or capable or ambitious or a good leader I mean all of these qualities that I would I would be sort of pleased to have assigned to me But then you notice that they're suddenly missing in the other person and I think that's one of those Critical clues that this might be happening. Ryan do you have like a moment or a text that you know kind of help this click for you Initially, I mean the first time I heard about it was from of my first analytic therapist And I think I was having some kind of an argument with a roommate and Just wasn't understanding what was going on inside of me that felt totally not mine Often around kind of like say a masochistic phenomena, you know of sort of do or done to Kind of stuff And I think that projective phenomena projective identification is often kind of goes Part and parcel with those more do or done to Victim perpetrator kinds of back and forth dynamics So it was very helpful for me to get slightly disentangled from that I think the example I mean it's funny because I This is one of those concepts that I don't know when I first learned it or when it first crystallized because I feel like I'm still learning it and it's still crystallizing and in particular. When it happens, you know, in my personal life, there was a moment several years ago early in my marriage and I don't know. My husband has this capacity to just not identify with projections, but to sort of catch hold of them and then meaningfully not react. It's really astonishing. He's a much better analyst than I am and he's not an analyst. I was saying something quite hateful. I'm sure about a loved one and as I want to do and then. As we are all wanted to do. Well, right. And then I and then I became, you know, pretty paranoid that my husband was horrified by what I was doing. And then I proceeded to accuse him of being horrified by what I was doing and judging me and condemning me in his mind. Of course, none of this I had access to. He wasn't really saying or doing anything. I was just certain that this is what was going on in his mind and I said something about, you know, you must think I'm just a really awful, awful person. And he calmly said, I mean, I will if you need me to. Wow. I was an analysis still at the time and when I told my analyst, I mean, she almost fell out of her chair laughing. She was so delighted. I think if she could have she would have high five him. That's a very remarkable. That's her blessing for your marriage too, I think. So that could pass me for how I think, yeah, maybe I could pull back and just I'm trying to think I'm making a small list of like themes or terms that are ordinary language that we can carry with us as we go forward. Right. And what's very striking about them is that they're all in binary pairs. Right. And then we get a little anxious about slippage between those binary pairs. But we've got the like this is me. This is not me. This is you and this is me. It's slightly different. And then also sort of this distinction between like the active and the passive. Like this is being done to me or you were doing this to me or I am being this way. And some of those things can be synonyms. Some of those relationships are those binaries map on to one another. They're cleanly in certain circumstances. But in other ways, they don't necessarily. So it's like it's a confusion along or at least we could begin to point to this a phenomena that activates or is present in a confusion between the terms of those binaries and also that kind of traverses multiple sets of them. That makes me think of it's another, you know, pretty critical concept. I mean, thinking of the paper that climbed the road from which project of identification arose was notes on some skeezoid mechanisms from 1946. And what I'm talking about, I mean, it's skeezoid basically just means split, you know, to split between two things. Self and other good and bad particularly good and bad. And so she comes up with this idea of the skeezoid position. Well, she first calls it the paranoid position fair Baron, a contemporary is calling it the skeezoid. And she ends up bridging the two and calling it the paranoid skeezoid. So this is the position that many people are probably familiar with the paranoid skeezoid position. You can think in terms developmentally, but it that's only helpful in so far as to get your head around it. These are positions that were all always vacillating in and out of. But one of the hallmarks of the skeezoid the paranoid skeezoid position is the splitting of good and bad. And it's from this position that often projective identification is operating because there is a fundamental lack of integration that is a hallmark of the depressive position. And you know, maybe we'll get more into that how but projective identification isn't only occurring in the paranoid skeezoid. It's more about the degree of intensity and absoluteness. The sort of the absolutism of the paranoid skeezoid position is really one of its great features. Things are all this or all that, you know, and I think we people who work with folks that are kind of in a more borderline level of organization are familiar with that cognitive black or white thinking. This is really grown out of the paranoid skeezoid position of needing things to be this or that. Maybe a good moment and I'm thinking about this also because we did an episode once on splitting. It was it was a it was a paywall episode and it was about Donald Trump. It was after two Biden's last debate. And we talked about Trump splitting by talking about things like America being the greatest country that's ever existed versus shithole countries. We're talking about just these this is sort of like mannequin approach to the world. I'm bringing this up right now, not just because I think that has like some some sort of traction. I think you can people will hear that and be like, oh, yeah, right. I've encountered people like so and so is the greatest so and so is the worst. Right, there are people that you will run into who have a habit of being like of lumping people into one or those two. You know, there's this sort of idealization and then, you know, total devaluation. Right. But one of the things that I think is is important to get across here is the extent to which projective identification is often something that we associate that we treat it negatively. It's not only is it like Nancy McWilliam says like a headache to deal with, but it is often associated with with people who've been diagnosed as borderline. And that's not wrong, right. But I think it is important to say that splitting is something that everybody has to go through. And that even the most like, you know, quote unquote, well integrated personality as an adult will still engage in this, even though it's a very primitive defense. And what I'm really building to is that projective identification, even though it has these sorts of, I think, for a lot of people negative. Connotations is also fundamentally a form of communication. It's something that we all still do. Even as adults, even as again, like fairly well integrated adults, it may not be the primary mode of our communication. But it is something that is still that is a form of communication and that is operative kind of, you know, across the board. Some, some disambiguation might be helpful here to connect the dots also to kind of the stakes of what we might call the defense mechanisms more generally. Yeah, that would be good. When someone, if you're having a fight with somebody and you say you're being defensive, right, that's never good. That's never, that's rarely a good thing, right. What I never say that. Well, what doing this reading made me think about, I mean, was how sometimes maybe the question isn't, well, the question would be like, what's the opposite of being defensive, right. And some of those encounters might be all I'm being able to be more open and listening to you, right. But other times people are defensive because they feel under assault, right. Or another way of saying this is that the defense mechanism or defense mechanism more broadly and people can do different lists of them. Right. I think I can get a book of 101 of them and anafroy it at 47 and wait, what the different levels, different strokes for different folks on this stuff. But like the idea here is that they are not just because they're called defense mechanisms, oppositional bad or negative normatively, but that they're rather like safe guards. Or they're about defending something and in that sense, they may also be developmentally things that you develop or have to have in order to have a self that is defended, right. And in that sense too, I want to make sure that we evacuate as much as possible. Similar sort of like normative assumptions vis-à-vis the language of either the the schizoid, right. I think we want to meet say very technically like has this enemological center is being about a cut. It's about a split. It's not necessarily, and logically it's it's related to the schizoid against a frenia, but it's it doesn't quite mean that in that sense, right. And client herself will go to pains, but like I'm not saying all babies are literally, you know, paranoid or schizophrenic right and did over paranoid too that these are positions as you say their structures, right. And they can only be understood in relation to one another. But also more broadly, the question of how the defense mechanisms can be described as variously more sophisticated or primitive is also not necessarily normative distinction, but rather more about like a developmental sequence or the ways in which they relate to problems that are are cruder or more complicated respectively, I in here I'm with Nancy McEuley, I'm like we get a lot of the primitive defense mechanisms are about establishing the they're about the self or whatever we're going to call the self can part of the problem here too is we're talking about about neonates and clients specifically, right? - Yeah, like incipient selves, self, incipient selves. - Becoming self, right? Or like the pre-self. - Like the infantile ego, if you want to say that they're such a thing, yeah. - Establishing its relationship to the world or being about like self and world. And that then the other more complicated defense mechanisms are about like, well, what specific things are within me, right? It's a little bit more meta-cognitive almost. But the theme I kind of wanted to really hit throughout all this is this idea that these defense mechanisms are understood again, not to be bad, per se, to be developmentally necessary at certain points and to be key features of how, you know, we use a sort of foreign language here 'cause that may be a little helpful. Like the subject gets made. And another sort of three related terms I kind of wanted to put down here, but these are all variations of the same, right? But like is the idea of, and much like the paranoid skis or the depressive or splitting versus denial or whatever you have to understand them in related to one another, right? We can sort of work backwards and say that, not only speaking the, like normal or at least neurotic person has a more or less integrated sense of self, right? And at that point, if we have integration as sort of like a normative sort of structural center, on the one hand you have the possibility of disintegration, right, which is the integrated thing falling apart. But then also, and before that, temporarily, you have the state of unintegration, which is the kid or the person on the track to becoming integration before they have become an integrated thing. And I think that part of what is so powerful about the projective identification as a specific defense mechanisms that's tethered to some of these phenomenon developments is that those intense kind of encounters, those bewildering encounters, like you're just describing actually, or like he's very clarifying, but also encounters that reveal like you're having a fight with someone and it's like, well, if it did spread out over several sessions and been analyzed from position neutrality, you'd call it transference neurosis, right? Here, it's like a pressure-cooked transference, well, I want to call it like a psychosis, or it's something much more intense and destabilizing than just misidentifying attributes of a person, right? Or like living out your relationship to your boyfriend or the way it might be like you might be your dad. Or here, it's a much more radical thing that cuts at the stakes of integration or of disintegration or of being unintegrated respectively. I'm wondering if it would help to try to situate like what's going on in the paranoid skewsroid and what's going on in the depressive, thinking in the kind of a cliny and register of the infant who is necessarily omnipotent to think in a winnacodian register about needing to be able to believe that it is in charge of the world when it's hungry, the breast appears. And this makes the breast good. When the breast doesn't appear, the breast is bad. This is the first split is what Klein would say between the good breast and the bad breast. And it's toward the good breast and the bad breast that the infant begins to have fantasy and where sort of internal states of unpleasure can get projected and attributed to the bad breast. And internal states of pleasure can be attributed to the good breast. And gradually over time, the infant becomes to discover that actually the breast that's good and the breast that's bad are the same breast. And this could be a source of profound persecatory guilt because you've been chomping at that breast and fantasy you have been destroying and sort of carving out and devouring and filling up with shit, that bad breast. But that's also the same breast that feeds you. So what the fuck are you supposed to do about this? And you could stay in a state of constant persecution and have the sort of the guilt that's associated with that, which is, I mean, I get locked up and destroyed. Or, and this is where the depressive position comes in, you could have the guilt that leads to some kind of repair, some capacity to, but that requires the capacity to integrate, which requires the capacity to bear the conflict between, I hate and I love. And this is the sort of the neurotic's achievement and so far as the neurotic can be ambivalent. Whereas the person who's more on the borderline between neurotic and psychotic struggles with the ambivalence. And that could be because they'd sort of lack the psychic structure that's required to be able to hold what seemed to be opposites. And, you know, Klein, I think would sort of situate that. And she says so, some would effectively, and let me find it here. The greater or lesser cohesiveness of the ego at the beginning of postnatal life should be considered in connection with the greater or lesser capacity of the ego to tolerate anxiety, which, as I have previously contended, is a constitutional factor. So it's a very complicating element. I mean, she's basically saying, some babies are more constitutionally equipped to tolerate anxiety than other babies. And, you know, in this sort of forms, a lot of how we might think about who ends up struggling psychically with these kinds of intense anxieties. - This is, that's really helpful in clarifying. And I think at the risk of saying something obvious, but I think I kind of want to do this just for people who have. - None of this is obvious. - Okay. And I think it's worth saying that for people who are listening to this and are like, where did the breasts come from? Right? Or being like, what's going on with all these breasts, right? And just the one breast. - Right, right. - Right, yeah. Or even just the idea of like, there'd be a good breast and a bad breast. Like, it's. In other words, they're running up against the difficulties of how this is a vocabulary and a way of thinking or almost like a state of parables and like a landscape that's very different from what we have previously been exploring, namely in the Freudian space, where like, there's mom and there's dad and there's the kids anxieties to dad. And then the kid grows up into a young man who has a neurosis and then he goes to see Sigmund Freud and Sigmund has a beard. And he's like, oh, doctor, you remind me of my dad, right? In other words, Freud's dealing with people generally speaking and he actually says he can't deal with people who are not capable of thinking in terms of subject object dualism and having relatively stable senses of self. - Yeah. - And developmentally then, that also, you know, his developmental theory and his theory of orthology comes from also only really starts with that achievement. Having been kind of reached, right? And in other words, he begins with the edible, with like, there's this triangular relationship between the maternal function, if you want to use that language, the paternal function and this little kid. Whereas what Klein is doing is trying to explore the the pre-edible like developmental, but also like affective and constitutional states of the emergent child before it gets into a position where it can substitute people or relate one person to another person or even like realize that mom is a human being who has two breasts attached, right? And if that sounds bonkers or like really radical to think about part of that is like the price of thinking, I think part of price of Andrew Fregio with Klein, like you got to get into the breasts and the shit and the extradition, et cetera. But it also is we're thinking about how babies don't have language. They don't have subject object dualism. They don't have object permanence, right? And if you pick up a baby and it's crying, that baby could be, it obviously only has two settings, right? It's happy or it's crying. And if it's crying, yeah, really does. And like you have to basically troubleshoot the baby to be like, is this baby crying? Because like, is the baby crying? Because one, it is hungry, i.e. it's stomach is empty, two, it's diaper is full, it's excreted, or is it stomach full of gas and does it need to be burped, right? The kid doesn't tell you and also by, in this I think the gambit that Klein asks us to make, but it's a very reasonable one despite what it does to language. The kid doesn't know if it's stomach is full or empty, right? It's just, it's in distress, right? It's this emergent state of what's silk trope as anxiety. - Well, this is where I wanted to just tag in for a minute here, Patrick, to, you know, to paint with a broad brush for a moment. I think it's also, I mean, I think you're very right that you have to kind of like inhabit this, this cliny and world to be able to get any, any traction and what we're talking about. But to riff on what you were talking about, about like the affective landscape of the baby, I think it's worth saying that, I mean, honestly, even to a weed climb, you have to have a fairly high tolerance for distress. But the affective world of the very young infant that is being described here is just like of a different order. Like it's in a different universe than the way that Freud is thinking about it. And, you know, I'm not sure that it's exactly right to draw from the language of philosophy. to do so, but I almost think of it as something where like it's far more like the stakes of it, like the emotional stakes are far more existential in the sense that like the things, the feelings with which this this infant is being driven are things like persecution annihilation, profound threat. Right. I mean, it's not like Klein doesn't talk about the feelings of like completion and wholeness that the good breast gives to the baby, but it is this landscape of paranoia. And of, I mean, annihilation is the right word. I mean, I'm blocking that directly out of the text. Right. And in the face of those kinds of truly horrifying anxieties, what is what is one's recourse really except to be omnipotent and omniscient? I mean, how the hell else are you supposed to survive? But to be all powerful and all knowing, to be able to know what's happening, you're not going to be surprised, which is to say you're not going to be traumatized. There will be nothing out of order. Everything will be exactly as it must be. And this is the narcissistic situation. You know, I mean, that's sort of one of the other, I guess I see as kind of one of the other terms to use somewhat interchangeably with skis, or I'd not that they mean the same thing, but they kind of describe this same picture of what's going on, what's at stake here. And it's me being in charge of the world and in charge of my objects, because the alternative is, as you were just describing, a hellscape, absolute hellscape. Yeah. And so, I mean, Brian has kind of has brought us into this essay notes on some skit, so I had mechanisms from from 1946, which is where the term projective identification first appears. And maybe this is is a good moment now that we have brought everyone into like, Klein baby world with us, to think in addition to thinking about splitting, which we've which we've gotten to, and which is, you know, the paper begins in a lot of ways with with splitting, to think about in Klein, these these terms that I think are really going to be important for us to get into in their more than colloquial sense, which is to say projection, interjection, identification. Does that sound, does that sound good to folks? Yeah. And a throughline here that we just begin with is by to really sit with those terms almost like in their etymological or like straightforward significance as like movements or dynamics in like this drama of the child trying to survive and understand where it is in the world and developing a better understanding of itself as as a as some sort of object or a subject, right? And again, all the language is very hard there, but another way of saying this is for Klein and counter for it from projection is like you saw this aspect of me because of someone you saw like and there's all these like we're dealing with people here. Projection is happening on the level of like literally pushing outwards or absorbing in. And that's both like proto conceptual, but also very embodied. There's a nice line. I'm looking I'm looking at Nancy McWilliams here again in who has a really good section on projection and projection and projective identification. And I'm reading this because I think it's clarifying, but also because it turns about the way that I had previously thought about these things like in my head, I think projection is like there's a thing that is in you that UX journal like in the most basic sense like there's something is within you put it without there's there's two spaces. There's a directional relationship. And here's how here's how McWilliams sums this up in one sentence. Projection is the process whereby what is inside is misunderstood as coming from outside. Which I think is a really interesting way of thinking about that. I don't know because I don't for the two of you do you have that sort of like visual image of like I'm pointing at myself. It's like arrow outwards when you think of of projection like the thing you know what I mean. I think so. I mean well in Freud thought of it as the sort of misuse of a normal mechanism like the search for an external source for an unpleasurable experience. I mean this all kind of rooting it back in the pleasure principle and and you know what is this source of unpleasure it must be outside of me. And then sort of the misuse of that meaning the overuse of that kind of otherwise normal mechanism that any of us would would probably be in pursuit of what's going on to me. I don't feel good. It must be that. Exactly. It must be that. And McWilliams also has a very has a parallel for interjection calling it the process whereby what is outside is misunderstood as coming from inside. I think the thing that's like interesting to me and maybe this is just my little like you know fondness for like look on showing up is like that it's it's a hear the misunderstanding as like misrecognition like this is this sort of the error of perception. I think or in other words I hear what you're saying. I mean I think part of it is like the logic of misunderstanding or of understanding or of recognizing or not recognizing all hinges upon the the presupposition in least in language of a discriminating subject that can do these things. Yeah. And where there is like a legible distinction for us as observers between outside world and inner reality. Right. And what we're actually talking about here. And again I think it does crucially as you've already indicated Brian, a kind of double duty both for trying to wrap our head around the chaotic interior life of the neonate which has no sense of interiority. And you know maybe it's sucking on a breast sometime or other times it's a bottle or other times it's a thumb and does it does it really know the difference who knows right. And also like adults in extremist kind of breakdown states where the paranoid or sort of other types of decomposition can lead people to go kind of baby mode in certain ways right. Is that the way in which for client as I take it you get a integrated enough capacity to determine what is or is an insider outside. He's established through floored mechanisms of expulsion putting out taking in claiming as you disavowing as you etc. that together build something that is more integrated and that they can then do things like recognize or understand or not. It's really hard to talk about. It is. I know. I'm so puzzled. No, it's okay. We're taking people along with us. They really say forward example. So like the root verb right with it with the we get with the JECT right in the land and in the European before that it's like throwing or tossing like think about like some like ejection right you're in the F 35 as it's as it's finally failing you hit the eject button and then you fly out and you get decapitated by the canopy because I just how that works right but it's like literally it's pushing out that's actually a pretty good client in yeah exactly yeah it's ejection right and note that that like that that prefix with the the JECT sort of like the tossing moving yeah root verb there is it emphasizes a movement out of right. Quite a forceful one sometimes. Projection when I sorry can I just say when I teach when I teach like first years Freud and I play with this name we talk about like the like to intro it's usually like civilization is just intense we're like how do you get to the super ego as we think about like projection but we think about like introduction and I always use the example of projectile vomiting because it's like this really forceful thing that goes outward from inside the self to outward or to to beyond the self. So ejection is almost like you're it's drawing from right it's flight from yeah which can also be a kind of getting kicked out think about like I don't know like the baseball game where the the umpriors like you're rejected you're out they don't say you're rejected I know they don't say you're out you're out they're not a red card. Do not do not know but then projection again on this level of very simple stuff right it's it's something that is being there's like a perspective sort of shift here like a directional shift it's it emphasizes the well like a proposal is it is an offer that you're extending or a proffer is something you're holding out here it's a movement out that emphasizes a push dynamic from the source um and you know in every language people fighting I don't know imagine if the umpire goes after the pitcher and says you have to stop beating people with the ball. right? And the picture is like, no, you're throwing the ball at people, right? Where they go, no, no, that's clearly not how that works. But that's like psychological reproduction, right? This is the thing that I'm putting on you that actually I'm doing, right? It automatically, but you're not allowed to use sports metaphors anymore. Played your strengths, babe. The other terms that we have here, just, I'm going to gloss on this level of just like phenomenology, very basically, right? Like this idea of like introjection, which just before even talking about what we mean for client, we just think, okay, it's introjection. So it's like a tossing into or it's like a, it has some elements of like drawing from outside to within. And I think that's where we can, those are the three, like iterations of like eject project and interject, right? So, and you could see them sort of as being both opposites. I projection is me pushing outwards. Whereas, introjection is me like pulling inwards. And ejection is like me spitting out from. But what they all do is they kind of suggest movements across a, an incipient boundary. Yeah. So that's just, that's how like our initial sort of gloss of the, and that made me we could walk through like how these terms work for client, as she elaborates that was being more important than they are for Freud. And I feel like identification is again, I'm just let's use this like the most basic, right? Identification sort of etymologically involves the description of some multitude between types or kinds, right? I see this as an instance of that. I identify with the umpire because I don't know, I like their uniforms, right? Or I identify with the picture because I want to just throw things at people, right? In other words, there, that is a already a process where, at least in every day language, the terms that are being related are a little more stable and given, right? It's not what's being sort of taken for granted. There are at least kind of smuggled in is this idea of some stability between I'm doing, I identify something in you. I understand that you were different from me and I will be drawn to it. But it's not quite on the level again of like the baby stuff where the baby is literally nying on you or shitting out words or otherwise like taking in and, and I don't want to say putting out um, expelling, yeah, vacuuming, taking taking in and expelling. It's body horror. Like these like body horror actually does some work here, right? This is like the grounding of initial embodiment through operations of, literally like extruding or consuming or just injecting violently. Whereas identification is about, it doesn't necessarily have the same, like the same stakes or the same, like I can identify with someone without eating them or feeling like they're going to destroy me. But the client baby can't. And I think that's important is that there is quite a lot of slippage here between the idea of interjecting to take the outside and bring it inward and identification, right? To take that self or to take that external object into the self. In fact, for a client does constitute identification and it also constitutes insurjection. So broadly speaking then, the clienty and neonate, right, or this infant, right? Literally cannot speak. It's what in five opinions is establishing itself or is trying to navigate the world as like a task of integration for which its initial tools are processes of projection, interjection, ejection, et cetera. And then the work of identification here then becomes like a little more shaded because the question is also, and this is I think the other access to put on this, right? Is that there is a type of like initial experiencing of attributes, namely like good bad, right? Distressing, is it like, this is bad, I want to eject it. This is good. I want to be absolute states. Yes. I am either hungry or associated. I am either distressed or I am not distressed. That there's very little kind of intermediate ground. And I think that's where the interjection is, this is orality. I mean, this is where client following Abraham who had been her analyst and who was really bringing in these ideas around the sort of the oral, sadism, cannibalistic impulse. And I almost think of the sort of interjection as like an absorption in into the organism, you know. Which it plays so nicely with the way that in this text, client says that she doesn't want to say that the infant is projecting on to the mother but rather into, like projecting into. Which sounds like an infant. I mean, so far as on to suggests a surface which suggests separateness into is sort of a transmission in. You know, sort of between organisms that are not otherwise differentiated. Right, right. Where there's, yeah, that's exactly right. Guys, I get to feel a little nervous when we don't get into the primary text. So can we spend a little bit of time in this 1946 essay by Melanie Klein notes on some skitsoid mechanisms, which is this place for the original appearance of the term projective identification, which is going to later take on some other other meanings and is going to be, you know, a vex term that people will quarrel over and it will evolve. But can we look at maybe a passage or so? Does that sound good, Brian? You want to read for us? Yeah, I mean, so she's first of all, she's talking about, you know, one of the functions of the ego, of the developing ego is to manage anxiety and client thinks of anxieties is predominantly about annihilation and persecution. And so, and the footnote I read earlier about, you know, the infant's capacity to manage those anxieties is often constitutional. You could think in terms of temperament. But also then this is where we think about what the environment provides and is able to provide based on, of course, the constituents of the environment, the maternal figure, the paternal figure, the other caregivers, maybe we'll get into some later the social kind of implications of what, how society is structured as incapable or not capable, willing or not willing to provide for, you know, the organism, the infant in the face of certain anxieties. And so she goes on then to develop more of the thoughts around what the infant does with its hate. And so I'll quote, together with these harmful excrements expelled in hatred, split off parts of the ego, are also projected onto the mother or as I would rather call it, into the mother. And she has a footnote, the description of such primitive processes suffers from a great handicap for these fantasies arise at a time when the infant has not yet begun to think in words. In this context, for instance, I'm using the expression to project into another person because this seems to me the only way of conveying the unconscious process I am trying to describe. She goes on to say these excrements and bad parts of the self are meant not only to injure but also to control and to take possession of the object. Insofar as the mother comes to contain the bad parts of the self, she is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self. She goes on to say much of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed toward the mother. This leads to a particular form of identification, which establishes the prototype of an aggressive object relation. I suggest for these processes the term projective identification. When projection is mainly derived from the infant's impulse to harm or to control the mother, he feels her to be a persecutor. In psychotic disorders, this identification of an object with the hated parts of the self contributes to the intensity of the hatred directed against other people. As far as the ego is concerned, the excessive splitting off and expelling into the outer world of parts of itself considerably weakens it. For the aggressive component of feelings and of the personalities intimately bound up. up in the mind with power, potency, strength, knowledge, and many other desired qualities. I'll stop there and just kind of summarize what follows, which is that it's not just the bad parts of the self that can get expelled, it's also the good parts of the self. And so this is where the hazards to the ego are in, is another really critical idea that she's introducing. It's not just the sort of projecting out of bad parts of the self, but what goes with hatred and aggressivity is also ambition and capacity and the ability to think. And this is where post and neoclinians really pick up climb and make this work clinically. Is what happens is there's that you forfeit your capacity to use your own mind. And that's one of the great sort of perils of this sort of projective phenomena. - So I'm just trying to think about this in terms of our like drama of this little infant, right? Where the infant is attempting to, even though an agency is a fiction of language here, but the infant is on a track to understanding itself as a discrete thing that can navigate the world. It's also though for very basic biological reasons at the mercy of its environment, of its caregivers and has difficulty locating slash tolerating bad feelings. So I don't know when the bottle runs dry, right? Or when the diaper is too full, it will again, within this immersion sort of like topology or mapping of self relative to environment. I'm like, oh, the bottle is empty and that's bad, but I am the bottle or like that that that that this is me, right? Or the horrible thing I'm feeling on my diaper right now as it gets wet and cold, that's also me and that's bad. But clearly it's not good to feel that you were bad so some part conceptually of the child was gonna be like, that's outside of me. The badness is out there. And so this is sort of an initial kind of necessary thing, because yes, of course at some point we do want the child to know that the bottle is not part of its body and that it's full diaper is not it. But it's an initial sort of template for relating to the possibility of the self as containing badness. And if I take what she's saying here, correctly, I think maybe you tell me, the task is this sort of fraught enterprise of trying to be like, okay, I am good. That means I have to push away the things that might strike me as bad and they're not of me. And developmentally that's necessary, but only sort of good in so far as it later leads to a more integrated vision of goodness and badness and then maps on the better sense of the body, et cetera. But that also in adults, this kind of mimics what we see in people who are like, there is nothing that is bad in me, right? So does that sort of track, I'm trying to think of these two and now analogical modes? - Yeah, it does. I mean, there's two things, at least two things. One is for me, it feels and I think this is for so long. Let's just, let's just feel like this is hard. - Yeah. - You know, it's hard. Like we all have very furrowed brows right now. For me, it's actually less the line where Klein introduces the term projected identification that's clarifying so much as one of the earlier lines that Brian read, which is in so far as the mother comes to contain the bad parts of the self, she is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self. That, which I want to read alongside a line from just two pages prior in the same essay that I think is helpful because we're trying in some way to get, there's like the in and the out but also like the in and the out doesn't necessarily exist yet because it's being navigated and negotiated and brought into being. But there's also some sort of like isomorphism between the object and the ego at whatever stage, you know, the ego is at of being able to acknowledge or not acknowledge or understand or not understand. Those are all too high level words for what I'm getting at like the other as other. But Klein says, I believe that the ego is incapable of splitting the object and this is what Brian was talking about before with like the good breast and the bad breast, which is actually the same breast. I believe that the ego is incapable of splitting the object internal and external without a corresponding splitting taking place within the ego. And that seems important to me because this is where Klein starts to like really break my brain in some sort of ways where like a you know, in a Freudian story, I feel like you kind of get the like okay eventually the baby understands that it's not contiguous with the mother boundaries emerge. But here like to split the other right to that like really like primordial early division of this thing, which is in fact, although not yet in fantasy, understood as both the good breast and the bad breast, but separately like perceived as separately that that splitting is not just kind of turned outward. It's the splitting is is more radical than that. And so like there's always this confusion between object and ego. - Well, right because objects have been introjected - Right, exactly. - Forming internal objects. - Right. - And then often it's the sort of the content of the internal object that's getting projected out onto the external object or into the external object. - Right. - And that also conform a type of identification. Like oh there I am. And then that can get re-introjected. - Yes. - And back and forth and back and forth. And so too with the projection of the internal object's contents out or into another, so too can be sacrificed or relinquished or lost, parts of the ego, parts of the self, the capacity to think, the capacity to know, the capacity to see oneself is good. - Okay. - That's really clarifying. So maybe. - Yeah, that was beautiful. - And perhaps I'll try and put this even in our crude vocabulary earlier that we sort of I was voting earlier where it's like, it seems to be the case that the infantile development as a process of moving from a state of unintegration to greater integration, necessarily involves sort of like sorting mechanisms that mean that more integrated ego as it emerges, is going to be cut off from some aspects of itself, of necessity. And that on the one hand, I think that's the correlation between splitting of the objects and the splitting of the ego. And I guess we just say like objects here, not like physical tangible objects. - No. - They're like archaic mental representations of experiences. And usually they're people. - Yeah, but it's only the child's experience of the person. This is like asking like, what's a sheet of paper with only one side? Right, one that you can't have one side of sheet of paper. What's a coin with only one side? But here you actually can, in this archaic landscape, you can have partial objects or like you're like, pardon objects. But also the objects themselves are always partial, only in relation to one another, right? But the point that I'm trying to build to is this idea that that splitting is necessary for developmental, like subsequent integration, because it like allows for an internal, like medical, like, initial kinds of medical ignition, I guess you could say, right, this is me, this is not me, right? This isn't her, this is not me, et cetera. But there's always a, that there's always some possibility for a failure to integrate properly or an integration that remains open-ended or that hasn't been completed. And that correlatively has some impact on the shape of the emergency go. Does that seem to track? Okay. So yeah, we have that line from where like the projection of good feelings and good parts of the self into the mother is essential for the infant's ability to develop good object relations and to integrate as ego. However, if this projective process has carried out excessively, good parts of the personality are felt to be lost to the self and the mother becomes the ego ideal, which results in weakening and impoverishing the ego. And an over-strong dependence on external representatives of one's own good parts. You can see that in certain kinds of sort of or malignant, dependent kinds of character structure. I can't really exist without the other. All my goodness exists in the other. Yeah, you must. get this sense of, and Cline writes about this when she's talking also about the fragmentation, the sort of going to pieces of the self is like, of giving parts of yourself away. Right? There's a depletion, there's a diminishment of the self, which is also an inability to feel the self as some sort of integrated entity. So, so she's like both describing, and I think this is very, very hard, she's both giving us like that developmental account. Yeah. And also, we are necessarily also speaking in terms of like pathological clinical sort of accounts. And even if we don't want to have like an essential distinction between the normal and they have normal least functionally, we're talking about things that like adults or people with more established egos do, and how that resembles on the one hand, and then on the other hand, we're talking about things that happen developmentally. And I think, as again, they'd ask for the listeners, but to not read this as like a predictive account where it's like, well, if you necessarily had this, if you had this gets away disruption or this thing not integrate, you must necessarily become as good as a friend or something later on. But it's a, I think it carries through like the dynamics or like like the architectonics of this landscape, maybe in a way that is a little clarifying of what happens to adults, even if it's not like a mechanistic account, right? And if she or self says on the next page, the processes is splitting off parts of the self and projecting them into objects are thus a vital importance for normal development, as well as for abnormal object relations. As regards normal development, it may be said that the course of ego development and object relations depends on the degree to which an optimal balance between interjection and projection in the early stages of development can be achieved. So I'm inclined to pivot to beyond, but I don't know. Please, please. We can just talk about this for fucking out. It's so hard. Yeah. It just feels so interminable, trying to hang with Klein, where my mind goes thinking of beyond and what beyond does with projective identification. I guess to me, it feels so clinically helpful. Yes, please. And so, you know, beyond really comes to see what he would call realistic projective identification as opposed to projective identification that's really more about the pleasure principle of just sort of discharge of unpleasure. Yeah. So he creates this idea of the container contained and thinks that really, and this gets us into more of like sort of projective identification as unconscious communication, but where beyond would say is also really the the infants, sort of the growth of the capacity to think. And beyond situates, it's really, it's really elegant and also kind of wild, but he sees thoughts as preceding thinking. Yeah. And so, you know, thoughts is sort of comprised of this beta elements, sensory raw data that the infant has no capacity to do anything with. It's just felt. And so the infant projects its experience of these beta elements into the maternal container who through reverie performs alpha function on these beta bits, transforms them into alpha elements that can then be taken back in, interjected or re-entrajected as it were maybe interjected by the infant. And that in that sort of transaction, the infant now has the capacity to think that it's thoughts that sort of push for the capacity to think, which requires the mind of another. So being said that the hardest thoughts require two minds to think them. That's so elegant. I mean, it's just so exquisite, really. I mean, you're reminding me also of one of the first times that I encountered the idea of projective identification in a clinical text, which is in beyond experiences in groups, which I found to just be fascinating because he seems to have this sort of non-period ability to take projective identification, like both the fact of it and the, I guess you could say, the contents of it, just as data. And I think he makes it sound easier than I suspect it is, right? He has this kind of sense of like, once you get attuned to this, you should start to be able to know whether what you're feeling is what you're feeling or what is being transmitted and that there is a way to know. Yeah. And I think, you know, for me, the kind of bridge between that and I'm going to put it in sort of charmingly simplistic terms is where there is projective phenomena. I hear a plea for help. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I need help with this thing in my mind that I lack the capacity to metabolize on my own. Yeah. So how that presents clinically, you know, couldn't look all kinds of different ways. And I think this is why there's often different sort of positions or reactions to projective phenomena based on how that gets conveyed. You know, often it's quite aggressive or violent or it feels like this sort of intrusion, the ascribing of sadistic elements to me when I'm actually feeling quite benevolent or, you know, that sort of thing. But nonetheless, there is still, it's a plea for help. Help me think my thoughts because I can't do it on my own. And I think that's really what beyond brought in that softens the clienty and baby into someone that you might actually want to care for. Yes. And it's hard to say because like the thoughts that the person can't think on their own, maybe like the most self-relevant essential thoughts that they need to think and which they have, you know, to use this language like the impoverishment of the ego, they may have sort of foreclosed or not had the opportunity to think or they don't even the capacity to do it. I'm wondering maybe just a tie in what you both are saying, right? And I love that we're turning to be on here actually. This is one of those moments where we're beyond actually clarifying where it's like, and I love this idea of the image of like the re-introduction, interjection thing with the mother child diet there where it's like, it's like I'm thinking about like animals that will like, or even a parent, also chew a little bit of the food for the child where it's like you're allowing more, you're helping metabolize like the metabolism, the child's developmental process of metabolizing is actually a multiple participant thing. But the through line that I think is helpful to preserve from client here is also this idea that the capacity to think, particularly the capacity to think in ways that aren't binary or in ways that might force you to feel bad things or think bad things about yourself or think about the ways in which you could be bad or in any event that thinking in general oftentimes involves feeling bad and oftentimes a capacity to sit with feeling bad. And if you're not just like your cognitive resources but like your habits and even like literally just like the amount of like ego that's available to you to do this work is hung up on dealing with these very basic questions like still like how do I deal with this anxiety? How do I not fall apart? Right? If you're still worried about that integration process, then like the threat of disintegration is much more urgent and real and would make your tolerance for certain types of thinking much harder. And we could see how that might happen, you know, to lead to real pathological phenomena or at least to challenges in the therapeutic encounter. Which is, I mean, from a Bionion perspective, that's the psychoanalytic task is to build up the capacity to think one's thoughts and thoughts mean feelings as well as cognition and it's not just cognition, of course. To expand one's own containing capacities so that the voltage of affect can go up, up, up, up, up, up, and without falling to pieces. But that is the task, that is the clinical sort of project that we're embarking on. I mean, that's one take, you know, it's not necessarily, you know, coming to terms with one's instinctual impulses and then the conflicts that ensue, though that could be a part of it. That would be seen as almost secondary or tertiary to the primary task of developing the capacity to think one's own thoughts with the help of another. Is that a lovely line from Clion that I think speaks directly to this like interpretate which is describing analysis with patients who just write the schizoidens like interpretations which tend towards synthesizing this split in the ego, including the dispersal of emotions, make it possible for the anxiety gradually to be experienced as such, but for long stretches we might in fact be only able to bring the ideational contents of the anxiety together, but not the affect of anxiety. Yeah. That's exactly right. I think it is from that that beyond really grew his idea of the container contained. the affective piece. (upbeat music) - Brian, I feel like we've been talking a lot about the patience or in the client name context in the original text, I'm talking about the infant. We've been talking about the, let's say, like the projective identifier, right? But a lot of this work, at least a lot of the writing on projective identification, is by clinicians for clinicians. And I know that you're using this language, this Bionian language that I also find helpful of the container and the contained, but do you think you can talk to us a little bit more from the other side of the desk or the other side of the couch is not really the right word here necessarily. But what it's like to work in a clinical situation with projective identification, and maybe we can also get into why it is so associated with more severely distressed patients. So I'm thinking of, and I'm gonna try to kind of composite patient, in my mind to be thoughtful about that. But I'm thinking of, there's sort of this, it's kind of a multi-dimensional phenomenon so far as this thing that's happening seemingly defensively and that needs to get kind of worked out for the analytic diet is also itself a developmental process of differentiating self from other of also being able to go through kind of what Winnecott would consider, like the sort of necessary omnipotence of being able to see ones impact on the world. That this also then can yield this more Bionian sense of container contained. And so I think that the term is complex because it can be used in so many different registers depending on what's going on with the patient. So I'm thinking of a patient who, at one point, described sniping at me. And so this gave way to us thinking of this kind of internal object called the sniper, which is a very dominant sort of internal object, really probably, I mean, it had a complete monopoly on his internal landscape. It was the only way of negotiating contact with others was to sort of be on guard and ready to shoot. Any intrusion from another is a traumatic surprise and warrants sort of a murderous response, even if preemptive. And so this would play out in session with me, but then oftentimes I would be the sniper. And even when I found myself using the most sort of warm, supportive tone, what the patient would hear was a complete attack. And sometimes this would get enacted. I mean, the treatment nearly blew up multiple times over and over again. And gradually I came to see that I, to use the words from this matroni paper, I had to take the transference. And now I know I'm mixing up language with transference and projective identification, but sorry. And to sort of really, to read the script that was being assigned to me, I mean, this is, I think this is where analytic work is quite a bit like method acting. You have to actually come to identify with this role that's being ascribed to you, even if it's so contrary to your own self-conception, because that's what the patient has to be able to do. They have to be able to externalize their own internal conflict and play it out. It's the only way to be able to work through it. I mean, if they could just think about it on their own, they wouldn't be in an analytic care. In addition, it's presumably with the analysts that they can actually do this as opposed to their loved ones for their loved hated ones, who don't have the capacity or the will to help the person work through this. So I'm thinking then this patient over time, you know, and I'll add that as the sort of experience of these attacking others brings with it the lack of the ability to defend oneself, and that's where we think of the projecting of the ego's capacities as well, or the splitting of the ego. So I'm thinking of a different patient who is sort of always on guard for attack and also feels totally lacking. The resources required to survive, which would mean, you know, the ability to think, the ability to pause before responding impulsively, the ability to use humor, the ability to apologize, and then explain oneself in the service of repair. I mean, any of the things that accompany, you know, being in relationship with others, colleagues, spouses, children, I mean, they all require ego function, you know, to adapt to anxieties and to respond accordingly. And suddenly this person is just impoverished of the ability to do that, the ability to think, it's okay if I'm anxious and I say something foolish, I can go back and sort it out. Like, you know, most of the time we have the ability to do that, depending on how we conduct ourselves in the world. So that's another example of something being projected and in that way forfeited from the mind of the patient. And now I'm thinking of a different patient who, you know, over time has moved from really needing to act that out or enact the dynamics where I'm this bad person and they're the victim to actually being able to say to me, I think that you might be feeling this way about me, but I don't actually know, maybe I'm just projecting. You know, the ability to actually not only just sort of know that take responsibility for that, I mean, that to me is an example of the expansion of what can be contained, the ability to have the feeling of anxiety as opposed to immediately needing to evacuate it into action, to pause and notice it. - Yeah. - And not just the cognitive ability to do that, but actually the ability to even feel it in the first place. I think is another example where over the course of the analytic care, I have presumably been supplying by returning in words, you know, rather than acting out, I think that you're extremely anxious about me right now. I think that you're afraid that such and such and such and such. I mean, that's the analytic work of returning something that has been put into my mind in a form that can actually be metabolized by the patient and then gradually over time. And that's the client piece Patrick, you know, reading, you know, from just a cognitive understanding to an actual capacity to integrate at an affective level. - I was going to ask you, what does it feel like to be a container for a projective identification? - I mean, it can feel very frustrating. It can compel me to sort of prematurely put things into words. It can compel me to want to intellectualize, it can compel me to want to dissociate and shut down, depending on sort of what's I think being projected. And this is the real hazard, you know, beyond talks about how the maternal container that sort of refuses entry of the beta elements for any number of reasons that the mother's own traumatic history, current stressful situations, whatever it might be. If she's not able to do the alpha function on the beta elements, what gets returned to the child is sort of an unworked on sort of re-introjection that leaves the child with, as Beon says, a state of nameless dread. And so it's hard, I think it's really difficult to be kind of constantly taking in something, depending on what might be going on in my own mind. Sometimes it can also be very arousing, I think. And this is an area that, you know, Beon is not known for, right? I think to a lot of critiques of Beon, Winnecod, and plenty of other object relations that they sort of have been denuded of the erotic components of this. And so I think it's kind of interesting to try to bring that back in. And so far as taking in something from the patient can be extremely arousing, depending on what it might be, some kind of a developmental need, I think of my work with especially certain types of men who really desperately need to be able to go through a stage of phallic narcissism, to be looked at admiringly, like, to see their big penis and to be so excited by it and proud for them. I mean, that's not something that I think we're inclined to want to do for boys and men. And so I think a lot of men come into my practice desperately needing to be able to have that experience, which I would consider a very erotic experience. And I think that's part of why it gets disavowed by parents when the child is going through it. And I would reserve that only for biological males. I think that plenty of other people really have the need to be seen with their just their magnificent phallic capacities and performance and to be really excited by it. I'm struck by how one of the temptations you describe is as like a flight from sitting with productive identification is the the intellectualization or the delivering the premature interpretation and it really makes me think about how this entire way of thinking both conceptually and also clinically in terms of the subject populations. I think it you know it's kind of cold standard for these famously useful for are people for whom the work of classical psychoanalysis as like a resolution of transference neurosis from a position of analytic neutrality, right? I you just you're doing you're you're identifying back to the person the projections that they are putting on you and where your counter-transfer experiences are essentially subjective data points about like characters that have already been in this story or like attitudes of people that are already in this landscape that have been named or themes that have come up in other words things that have been metabolized in the language. Right. What's doing the the pushing here or the pulling think about it either as like gravity or as like a lump in your stomach or the thing that's not being metabolized is something unspoken in the subject of the person that they are that you're interacting with that they can't put into words for themselves and if you give them words that's not going to help them either and in it with it's more kind of radically unhelpful than just a you know a mistime interpretation with a neurotic because they're they have to feel something about themselves first. You're you're describing the move in psychoanalysis I think from a more epistemological to a more ontological I'm skeptical of pitting them as themselves a binary because I think the best epistemological treatments are are fundamentally ontological and ontological treatments involve epistemological elements in site building you know in site oriented treatments coming to know something about one self and one of my favorite quotes I say constantly free to from reichman purportedly said to rollo may you know one of the founders of existential psychotherapy and she said our patients need an experience not an explanation that's good yeah and that's really what I think we're talking about is the provision of of an experiential transformation that is in self expanding the capacity to contain one's own thoughts about one's experience and therefore and this is the other important bionion point first you have to be able to think about your experience and then you can learn from it you know because if you can't think about it if you're if you're if you're sort of only capable of expelling the sensory experience for all of the reasons that we've been describing the persecutory terror of encountering another and encountering the other and oneself if you can't think about that you can't learn from it and that's one of the core bionion ideas is really to be able to learn from experience this is really clarifying vis-a-vis the themes of like grandiosity or sort of like manic personality types and symptoms in so far is that it's like paradoxically the person who shows up and is like now I'm not gonna and who is just filling the room with themself right for projective identification but also through narration etc even as they seem to be so agential and so larger than life they're actually caught in that earlier sort of to use our our vocabulary that we were talking about earlier like this this kind of trap of like I'm actually very passive in this right right I'm actually I seem to be the lord of my own experience but actually I'm letting experience that is inflicted on me predetermined everything I do right and such that like they can't even in there be like it's all about me their inability to tolerate like the not me and me or like they can't something about that means that they're actually having less of a sense of me in general right the very assertiveness is dispositive if I back to go back to climb a core anxiety right and in that way an impoverished ego mean a very narrow narrow superficial and a two-dimensional ego your ability to just to tolerate I'll just be for myself my uncertainty and confusion here has been transformed like it's got amazing like I envy your patience you know oh that was a nice I didn't I couldn't tell if you were saying patience or his patience I think I was saying both yeah yeah there's a lot to think about and I'm gonna keep chewing on it because maybe we'll come into this in the second episode but I'm just thinking about how confused and and and anxious I was feeling earlier and and now I don't feel that at all and it does feel like there's been some metabolic work going on with the three of us yeah to hang with this really troubling concept you know yeah part of what I think the what's so hard about this is that I think sitting with these uncertainties long enough activates a lot of anxieties we have about well not just our own sense of agency you know abstractly speaking or even personally speaking but just literally the ways in which like institutions and roles require us to be a gentle to take responsibility for things right to supposedly state what we mean and and ask for what we want and make interpretations or just interact with one another as though those interactions were transparent and accountability were clear and this is really cunning against that Brian this is my my brain is on fire and in like both like a good and also slightly painful way I'm so glad that we were able to have this conversation and even more excited that we're gonna have another one so for those of you who want to hear more about predictive identification stay tuned because there will be another episode next weekend and we're gonna put the term to good use yeah Brian thank you so much it's always such a pleasure to to talk with you and to learn from you you're very welcome it's been my pleasure thank you so much for listening to this episode of ordinary on happiness ordinary on happiness is completely made possible and kept ad-free for everybody by the generous support of our Patreon community if you'd like to hear our follow-up episode part two on projective identification which will be available next week behind the paywall and if you would like in general to get to additional episodes of ordinary on happiness per month including our journey through the standard addition please come find us at patreon.com/ordinaryonhappiness this has been an episode of ordinary on happiness a podcast about psychoanalysis politics pop culture in the ways we suffer now i'm abby kluchen and today i was joined by patrick blanchfield and brian ghostsmith this podcast is produced by dan yowell theme music by formal chicken