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Every psychoanalytic book potentially brings the reader two distinct gifts. The author gives us their novel formulations and/or syntheses of others' formulations that justify the publication of the work and, secondly, the author gives a glimpse into a way of being, clinically and maybe personally. Perhaps, readers come to and leave the book with reflection, sometimes more about the first and sometimes more about the second gift.
I was sitting with a patient a long time ago and, as she spoke, I found myself entering a quiet reverie about my analyst. I was hearing Harold's voice in the patient's communication. And I mused for a moment about the possibility of transgenerational transferences and identifications. I could not recall reading about or considering the manner by which identifications might be passed down from one analytic treatment to another. Bad identifications, I toyed with myself, were just passed down from narcissistic and otherwise troublesome parents to their children who eventually came to us for treatment. I went back to reality quickly and accepted the obvious: “we are all what transferences are made of.”
How much of us, I later wondered, lags behind in love we've felt and arguments we've had with our analyst or with Freud … or with both? There, too, we received multiple gifts and experienced multiple heartaches, just as we do when another clinical author shares the results of decades of their work in the trenches of bearing and receiving transferences. Whether we agree with them or not? There are always multiple gifts. Maybe growing up is about accepting that little truth.
We all know that these transferences and identifications are troublesome or can be troublesome … but we all know that they certainly exist. I don't want to be misunderstood. I am speaking, indeed, in broad terms about something like Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation that theorizes that every two thingamajigs in the Universe have a gravitational pull towards each other. Of cours