The Analyst as Translator

Abstract

Through projective identification and a variety of transference acting out dynamics, some analytic treatments are strongly marked by the patient's avoidance of any exploration or working through of core depressive anxieties and paranoid fears. Through counter-transference acting out, the analyst can become part of this unconscious effort to not explore the internal life. One case is used to show how the analyst can be supportive of the patient's external, environmental struggles, but collusive to the avoidance of more psychological, intra-psychic matters. Several other cases are used to illustrate the patient's need to not only avoid ownership of unacceptable psychic experiences, but to push the analyst to be the translator, holder, and spokesperson for their unconscious conflicts. This is the result of psychological conflicts involving desires to reveal, express, and work through difficult object relational issues that are matched by intense convictions about the danger or distaste to do so by oneself. So, the patient, via projective identification, enlists the analyst to do the undoable or the undesirable. Case material is used to show the importance of consistent interpretation of these transference efforts. Various degrees of success are achieved, depending on the analyst's level of enactment and the patient's level of emotional standoff.