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This volume brings together more than two dozen papers by the Spanish psychoanalyst, Leon Grinberg, a former vice-president of the International Psychoanalytic Association and currently Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Ateneo de Madrid. Many of these papers have never been published before in English.
Almost half the book is concerned with two concepts which lie at the heart of the psychoanalytic undertaking, yet which are rarely scrutinised - the notions of identification and identity. The former is for Grinberg ‘central and basic to the understanding of the development and organisation of the personality’, a fundamental process in the formation of the ego, super-ego and ego ideal, character and identity since ‘it is a constant in the interplay between subject and objects’.
Starting with a lucid exposition of the theory of identification as expounded by Freud and by those who came after him, Grinberg goes on to examine the relationship between identification and internalisation on the one hand and externalisation on the other. The former includes processes such as incorporation, assimilation, imitation and introjection; the latter, extrojection, projection and, of course, projective identification. This latter is given especial examination, and the development of the concept from Klein through Bion, Rosenfeld and Meltzer charted. In doing so, Grinberg presents a careful elucidation of a concept, greatly used, perhaps overly so and much misunderstood, in which different aims and modes are distinguished.
Grinberg also puts forward a theory of what he calls projective counteridentification. By this he means a specific reaction which arises in the analyst as the result of the excessive intervention of projective identification by the analysand. In such cases, the analyst ‘ceases to be himself and turns unavoidably into what the patient unconsciously wants him to be’. This may sound similar to Racker's concept of ‘complementary countertransference’. The difference, howev