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ON 5TH JUNE 1985 THE British Psycho-Analytical Society held a Symposium on Projective Idenfication. During the discussion Hanna Segal pointed out that the analyst is in no position to interpret if the interpretation is based only upon what the analyst is feeling in the session. Unless it is possible to identify how the patient is contributing to what the analyst is feeling, and in such a way that the patient could recognize this, then it is better to remain silent.
It is, of course, essential that the analyst not interpret simply on the basis of what he is feeling—that amounts to magical understanding of the patient. Some patients actually will welcome this kind of intervention because it gratifies their passivity and their wishes to be drawn into a state of merging with the analyst. Other patients, however, will experience it as omnipotent, intrusive and persecutory.
One of the most significant shifts in psychoanalytic technique, in the past forty years, has developed from the changing attitudes to countertransference and from the diagnostic significance attributed to the analyst's affective responses to the patient (Winnicott, 1947) ; (Heimann, 1950) ; (Little, 1951) ; (King, 1978) ; (Epstein and Feiner, 1979).
During this period of time the process of projective identification has come to be seen as a means whereby unmanageable affects are communicated to another person. An unconscious hope is implied in this process, that the recipient may be better able to manage being in touch with these difficult feelings than the person seeking to "get rid of" them (Bion, 1967) ; (Rosenfeld, 1971) ; (Grotstein, 1981) ; (Ogden, 1982) ; (Casement, 1985).