Identificatory Processes Research Articles

Karl Abraham, The Origins of Projective Identification and The Day of Atonement

Karl Abraham, one of Melanie Klein’s analysts, undoubtedly influenced Klein in her clinical and theoretical thinking. Abraham was arguably the first analyst to focus on character, as well as the relationship between bodily experience and object relationships—central to the concept of projective identification. His writing on mourning (like Klein’s, intensely personal) described identificatory processes with the lost object. In a lesser known essay, Abraham applied some of these ideas to the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Through examination of this lesser known paper, this article describes how Abraham initiated ideas around the concept of projective identification, and then extends Abraham’s early ideas to a more contemporary understanding of the concept. This extension represents a contemporary elaboration of a psychoanalytic contribution to a study of ritual, which was of great interest to many early psychoanalysts—among them, Abraham.

Filiation, transmission et rupture. Vers une clinique transculturelle et psychopathologique des liens de filiation au Togo

ObjectiveBased on a clinical case drawn from their daily practice, the authors of this study analyzed the cultural and religious dynamics involved in the representations of the filiation among Guin people of Togo and described the disorders related to the rupture of filiation ties as well as the therapeutic rituals performed in this case. MethodsIn addition to the identified case study from the CHU Campus of Lomé, the authors conducted a historiographical investigation of the Guin cultural ethnos and carried out ethnographic interviews with three key informants of the community. FindingsFiliation is based on the principle of the debt to the ancestor, collectively valued and sublimated. The identification of the child to the ancestor goes through the attribution of the first name, during the rites of presentation and integration to the community. The rupture of filiation ties by some transgressive acts from his parents can provoke disorders of the identificatory process manifested by psychotic disorders, pervasive developmental disorders, eating and behavior disorders, repeated failure… In addition to conventional care in hospitals, the use of therapeutic rituals including the management of shame and guilt, forgiveness and reintegration may allow the patient to be reconciled with his origins. ConclusionThis clinical case study has shown that in the rupture of filiation ties, carrying out some traditional therapeutic rituals may help the patient to reconnect the broken links. This transcultural approach can be a complementary perspective to conventional care in hospitals when the healing process is not forthcoming.

Trans*feminist Intersections

Abstract The author argues that trans* materialities are part of a trans*feminist politics of becoming-intersectional, which emphasizes the movement underlying identificatory processes. Articulating trans* as a dynamic movement of becoming-intersectional undermines both the normative construction of bounded categories and the identities that emerge from these processes, thereby allying trans*, feminist, and intersectional politics. Moreover, conceptualizing politics in this manner foregrounds the “categorical miscegenation” of both intersectional theorizing and trans* scholarship, and it contributes to ongoing conversations in both bodies of scholarship that are concerned with the ways in which categories operate politically. By highlighting the political stakes in the materialization of matter and the concomitant production of categories and identifications, a trans*feminist politics of becoming-intersectional foregrounds process over positionality and takes place at a fundamental level—at the level of materiality, where the ways in which matter materializes resonates politically.

On the Analyst’s Identification with the Patient: the Case of J.-B. Pontalis and G. Perec

The writer Georges Perec was in psychoanalysis with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis for four years in the early 1970s. In this essay, the author presents the exceptional interest this analyst took in this patient and the ways in which that interest manifested itself in his work, psychoanalytic and otherwise. Many correlative factors suggest that identificatory processes persisted beyond the treatment and were maintained into Pontalis’s later life. While this paper is primarily intended to provide evidence to support this view of a specific case, the author closes by reflecting that this may be a more general phenomenon and the reasons for this.

Yellow bodies, black sweat: Yao Ming, Ichiro Suzuki, and global sport

This article focuses on the relationship between Asian and Black athletes, global multiculturalism, and sport internationalism. Ichiro Suzuki and Yao Ming represent in clear ways the figuration of the Asian male body as both cultural phenomena and transnational commodity. This article describes the marked turn from the Asian male body as an unattractive representative for marketing commodity exchanges to an imported spectacle reproducing National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball transnational capital. However, it does not simply offer a conventional study of the political economy involved in the global expansion of popular sports. Rather, it attempts to illustrate how Asian men in US sports presuppose and indeed attempt to produce Asian masculinity through inverting the bodily emasculation of Asian American men. Throughout this article, I detail the ways in which popular sports has been racialized as a “Black” space of colonial fantasy and fears, and how Asian male athletes break down the fixity of this raciological thinking. The Black male body came to dominate celebrity and hero worship, an identificatory process that Norman Mailer once coined as “the white negro” or to use a famous slogan from a popular sports drink: Everyone wants to “Be Like Mike.” This article describes the ‘fetishization” of the Black male body and how representations of Ichiro and Yao subvert the fixity of Afro-Asian racial hierarchy.

On the capacity to suffer one's self.

Problems in the establishment of the sense of a 'psychic' skin, in the ways described by Bick and Meltzer for example, commonly give rise to distortions in the capacity for self-experiences as a consequence of difficulties in relation to projective and identificatory processes. These latter may acquire a markedly adhesive character as a defence against the anxieties that arise. This makes for considerable technical difficulties in an analysis. This essay addresses the nature of these problems and considers some of the ways in which they may be approached clinically.

Prise en charge des adolescents hospitalisés à la suite d’un geste suicidaire ou d’une menace suicidaire

Teenagers’ suicidal gestures are a major problem of public health and it is important to understand its meaning. A global taking care of teenagers hospitalized after a suicide attempt or a suicidal threat by the pediatric teams and by the team of child psychiatry, having links with each department, is essential in the Necker – Enfants Malades hospital in Paris. The protocole of care has been recently strengthened by the integration of a deep psychological checkup with the projective tests Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) during the hospitalization, a psychological follow-up from a distance of the suicidal gesture and a second psychological checkup one year later in order to observe the evolution of the psychic functioning. The projective tests offer a special way to express the own intimate problematic while respecting the subject's need to remain hidden. These tests, analyzed with a psychodynamic interpretation, help the clinician to precise the psychic diagnosis, which is very important for the future therapeutic orientation, and offer to the patient a medium to express the hidden meaning of his gesture. To consider suicidal gesture not only as a dead end of identificatory process but also as an attempt to start up again this process may favor a therapeutic mobilization of psychic resources. Self-attack may signify a struggle against melancholy, the prospect of death appearing less frightening than those of madness. Suicidal gesture may express a transitory developmental breakdown but identificatory process may be revived if the suffering of the teenager may be listened, contented, elaborated and linked to meaning.

The Atonement–Forgiveness Dyad: Identification With the Aggressed

In an effort to assuage the dystonicities of guilt and anxiety, the atoner forms an identification with his victim. Such an identification is, for the most part, unconscious and, to follow Racker's categorization, is either a concordant or a complementary one, with each pattern generating a distinct atonement narrative. Atonement is synonymous with neither reparation nor guilt, although each of them contributes to its formation and vicissitudes. Prominent in relational scenarios within the work of atonement is the search for a punitive “bad-enough object,” an external, self-recruited gratifier of the internal need for punishment. Later atonement scenarios are often thematically linked to earlier fantasies of destruction of the maternal breast (in Kleinian theory) or to the unfolding of the classical Oedipal tragedy. Atonement and forgiveness are constructed between the people involved, rather than being granted by one or attained by the other. Atonement wishes shape a number of partial identificatory processes that, when activated, form the ambience of the atoner–forgiver dyad. These include elements of repair, reconciliation, and repentance. The plotlines of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov reflect Dostoyevsky's emerging understanding of the atonement process, from an earlier focus on Raskolnikovian self-torment to an Alexian (Karamazov) vision of reparative benevolence. Revenge and atonement are closely linked, with atonement often representing revenge against the self, taken on behalf of a complementarily-identified-with victim. This article provides some clinical manifestations of atonement, representing a continuum of greater or lesser psychopathology.

The Roots of Envy: The Unaesthetic Experience of the Tantalized/Dispossessed Self

In this paper I suggest that no matter how omnipotent, destructive, or perverse the currents of entitlement and hatred are that envy coils around, envy often serves as a fig-leaf for desire—a psychic figuration of refused desire. This claim invites us to consider the vicissitudes of maternal subjectivity in order to understand the patient's unconscious envy. Whereas Klein's focused on the wish to spoil the good object or take something away from her, my emphasis is on the self and the archaic wish/need to feel at-one-with/the same as the object which, when not realized, can transform into destructive envy. This paper attempts to develop the following three claims: (a) the idea of lack, abjection and/or humiliation as a narcissistic precondition for unconscious envy; (b) envy as a phantasied, pre-emptive means of identifying with the object once normal identificatory processes have gone awry (Benjamin, J., 1988, 1995); and (c) the role of the analyst's subjectivity and unconscious communication in provoking or mitigating the patient's unconscious envy (Spillius, 1993)—specifically, the analyst's unconscious countertransference identification.

From demanding emancipation to negotiating autonomy: conflicting identifications in a changing world

In this paper I try to describe the central role that my involvement in the ideological climate of the seventies through participation in the feminist movement in Greece played in my professional practice as a psychotherapist and how these experiences informed a research project that I undertook in order to examine the changes in the identificatory process of Greek women. My personal, political and professional experiences interlinked in order to plan and realize this research project, which dealt with how femininity is constituted through the mother-daughter relationship in a period when the traditional position of women is rapidly changing in Greece. The results of the research show the difficulty of the passage from emancipation to autonomy, from certainty to uncertainty, from a politics of identity to a politics of conflicting and contradicting identifications, which the postmodern subject has to go through. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

With feeling: Writing emotion into counselling and psychotherapy research

AbstractCounsellors and psychotherapists bring unique knowledge to the field of research about the necessity for empathic connection to access participants’ lived experience, and about the co‐construction of knowledge by participant and researcher. The current study formed part of a broader study of the professional identity of social workers as counsellors and psychotherapists and the development of their practice‐based wisdom. Specifically, this study explored social workers’ narratives about critical incidents in their practice with particular reference to analysing the emotional experience of practitioners and the emotional response of the researcher. The sample comprised 18 clinical social workers who practised as therapists. They were purposively selected from professional associations and networks. Two semi‐structured one‐hour interviews were conducted with each participant, using professional biography and critical incident interviewing techniques. Interviews were transcribed, coded, and analysed using the NVivo software program, which facilitates a grounded theory qualitative analysis. The findings presented are from analysis of two participants’ interviews, which yielded rich emotional content in relation to both participant and researcher. The study concludes that revealing the researcher's identificatory processes, resulting from participants’ narratives, leads to a more truthful and accountable description of data collection and analysis in qualitative research and highlights how the researcher co‐constructs the data during data collection and analysis. This article advocates accepting subjectivity as an inevitable aspect of research and argues for the need to write subjectivity into research reports.

Loving a Disappearing Image

The author explores how a viewer identifies with a decaying or disintegrating film or videotape, given that cinema is, in effect, dying even as we watch it. She discusses several experimental films and videos that take as their subject the disintegration of film, often erotic film. A psychoanalytic model of melancholia is posited for this identificatory process, but it is found to be unsatisfactory since it is premised on the maintenance of the ego's coherence. Instead a model of devotional melancholia is posited for how one might love a disappearing image.

Negative Identifications, Messy Complexity, and Windows of Hope: Response to Pickles's Discussion Of “Qualities of Engagement and the Analyst's Theory”

The author agrees with Pickles concerning the emergent quality and unpredictability of what occurs in any treatment relationship, seeing these qualities as opening the door for either destructive or constructive relational forces to be set in motion. It is the analyst's striving for attunement and understanding through all the surprises, good or bad, that can determine whether what emerges is ultimately therapeutic for the patient. The author discusses “identificatory processes” in the writings of Loewald and Kohut. She distinguishes between positive and negative identifications and elaborates on the latter, suggesting how these can enter and undergo change in a treatment relationship.

À propos de l’offre de traitement en milieu correctionnel : guérir, soigner, aider

This paper adresses the complex unconscious identificatory processes which may silently be active within the clinician when he proposes treatment either to a child or adolescent in an institution or to an adult in a correctionnal setting. Three representations of treatment serve as a backdrop to analyse different identificatory movements on the part of the clinician and how such unconscious motivations may affect his work.

The Presence of Self

Part 1 I: Dialogic Processes Chapter 2 1 Dialogic Acts Chapter 3 2 Rhetoric and the Self Part 4 II: Identificatory Processes Chapter 5 3 Identity: The Continuity and Differentiation of Self Chapter 6 4 The Poetics of Identity Part 7 III: The Self in Action Chapter 8 5 Speaking of the Self Chapter 9 6 The Plays of the Self Chapter 10 Epilogue

‘What makes you a scientist is the way you look at things’: ornithology and the observer 1930–1955

In the late 1930s networks of amateur observers across Britain were collecting data on birds (British Trust for Ornithology), aircraft (Royal Observer Corps) and society itself (Mass Observation). This paper concentrates on birdwatching practice in the period 1930–1955. Through an examination of the construction of birdwatching's subjects, the Observers, and their objects, birds, it is argued that amateur strategies of scientific observation and record reflected, and were part-constitutive of, particular versions of ecological, national and social identity in this period. The paper examines how conflicts between a rural, organicist Britishness and a modern, planner-preservationist Britishness were elaborated and contained within the figure of the birdwatcher and within the institutional epistemologies of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the British Trust for Ornithology. Such conflicts are shown to be embedded in the structuring of visual perception in different strategies of bird and aircraft identification, particularly between analytic and gestalt methods; the paper examines, using the related ‘field-science’ of aircraft recognition, the importance of identificatory processes in the construction of the Observer, and concludes by examining whether tensions between organicist and scientific discourses were in any sense resolved by the end of this period.

Infant observation, experimental infant research and psychodynamic theory regarding lack of self/other differentiation

In this paper I draw upon infant observation, experimental infant research and psy chodynamic theory to explore the early development of internal objects in which there is no differentiation between self and object. I have used an infant observation to experiment with the idea that, early on, identificatory processes predominate over projective mechanisms. From developmentalist understanding of early perception, I have suggested that amodal perception may create a different kind of object than featural perception. With amodally shaped objects/representations the difference between self and other is irrelevant, and with feature-based objects/representations what counts is the difference.

The Shadow of Object Love: Reconstructing Freud’s Theory of Preoedipal Guilt

The systematic terms of metapsychology expressed in Freud's theory of oedipal guilt have overshadowed his emergent ideas about preoedipal internal objects and preoedipal guilt. This article reconstructs the latent theory of preoedipal guilt in his notions of narcissism, fantasy, aggression, and ambivalence. Special attention is devoted to his discussions of the narcissistic function of creating fantasized objects through identificatory processes, in order to compensate for loss or disturbances in object relating. Although Freud put forward the notion of oedipal guilt as a derivative of secondary mental processes, he intuitively grasped that guilt emerges from the conflict-bound sphere of preoedipal relations. "A Child Is Being Beaten" is used as an illustration, as are clinical examples drawn from the author's practice.

Transsexualism: Nature or counter-nature?

Abstract Among the many expressions of human sexuality, transsexualism is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the inexorable quality of a solution to sexual conflict which appears to go against nature. How are we to understand the transsexuals unrelenting demand for sexual reassignement? Taking two clinical vignettes as a starting point, the author presents his reflexion on the form of relationship that the infant, destined to become a transsexual, establishes in his or her mind at the very beginning of psychic life. The significance attached to “masculine” and “feminine”, as transmitted by the parents, is then studied for its effect upon the identificatory processes. The central thesis of this paper is that the so-called transsexual choice appears to have been the only solution that the child of the past was able to find, in order not only to acquire a sense of sexual identity but also to attain the conviction of his or her identity as a separate individual.

Aspects of Identification in the Large Group

Summary This study extends to the domain of the large group recent empirical investigations of identificatory processes in small group contexts. Data obtained from 41 participants in two group dynamics training conferences provided partial support for two hypotheses. Findings showed, first, that members felt more positively about themselves and tended to attribute more potency to leaders when in groups led by those of their own gender. Other results showed that degree of identification with leaders, in terms of perceived similarity of potency, directly corresponded to participants' feelings about themselves and amount of self-reported learning in the large groups.