Projective Identification and the Empathic Process—Interactional Communications

PSYCHOANALYTIC THERAPY IS A PROCESS fully involving two individuals who exert a mutual and ongoing influence upon one another. In what follows, we shall examine the manner in which a patient may allow himself to be understood by the therapist through the communicative properties of interpersonal influence in the therapeutic interaction. We hope to clarify the ways in which "interactional communications" from the patient may be understood and utilized by the therapist. The term interactional communication refers to all communications, both in words and in actions, which are transmitted through the interaction consciously and unconsciously by both patient and therapist.

In so doing, we propose to demonstrate that in the process of a therapist achieving empathic contact, the mechanism of projective identification from the patient is always involved; and conversely, that when a patient engages in projective identification, there is always the potential for the therapist to achieve an empathic outcome, whether or not this potential is actualized. Although previously thought to be unrelated—if not downright antipathetic—we intend to establish that empathy and projective identification represent interrelated aspects of a unitary sequence for the therapist's processing of interactional communications.

Although we emphasize our view of psychoanalytic therapy as a radically mutual process, we shall concern ourselves primarily with an examination of the experience of the therapist-in-interaction. A