More about Projection: Before and Beyond

The ‘thought’ which Jan McGregor Hepburn's interesting article Before and Beyond Projection? (British Journal of Psychotherapy, 9(1)), posed on problems surrounding the issue of ‘holding patients in mind’, activated my own ‘thinking’. I began to speculate about what the frustration might be, which when not tolerated might result, instead of thinking, in the ‘bad object’ and projective identification. I began to wonder about the idea which might lie behind the notion of being a ‘bad therapist’, were one to attend to patients in the particular ‘holding in mind’ described in the article, rather than maintaining a ‘proper therapeutic attitude’ which normally offers effective interpretation.

Besides Winnicott's ideas on ‘primary maternal preoccupation’, the concept which helped me most to clarify issues, was what in Jungian psychology is called ‘participation mystique’. Jung borrowed the term from the anthropologist Levy-Bruhl and then developed it further. He defined it (1921) as a ‘particular kind of psychological connection … which consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object, but is bound to it by direct relationship which amounts to partial identity’. This sounds much like projection of the usual kind. But Marie-Louise von Franz (1959) pointed out that ‘we can only speak of projection in the proper sense of the word … when the feeling identity is disturbed’. Projection implies ‘that the person is already to a certain extent out of the participation mystique, or archaic identity, until then there is no projection’. This seems to indicate that participation exists prior to the dawn of consciousness, that it is a process ‘before and beyond projection’. Indeed Jung talked of participation also as a ‘mutual unconsciousness’. He said that 'because the basic structure of the mind is the same in everybody, we cannot make distinctions when we experience on that level. There we do not know if something has happened to you or to me. A