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IN THINKING OVER OUR TOPIC FOR TODAY, "Projective Identification or Countertransference, " I wondered, why do we have to choose? I was reminded of a wonderful lecture I heard more than twenty years ago by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, about what
she called the "two-in-one." Arendt (1971) described the experience of dialogue in individual thought, and she noted how the thinker experiences solitude but not loneliness; in effect, the thinker keeps herself company. I think Arendt's phrase, the "two-in-one, " can help us focus on two facts: that a single person can experience himself as a social group, and also, conversely, that a group of two or more people can experience itself as a single unit, although it is often difficult to find the words to describe such experiences. And so I prefer to think not in terms of the dichotomy, projective identification or countertransference, but instead to study the "two-in-one" of projective identification and countertransference.
I think that our natural human tendency to think in terms of dichotomies, which the neurobiologist Gerald Edelman (1987) thinks is wired into our brains, causes a lot of mischief in dealing with projective identification and countertransference. Any premature or excessive concern with the question of who is doing what to whom is not part of the analytic attitude, as I think of it. As analysts, we develop the ability to leave the questions of blame and attribution aside. Patients need the room to present psychological issues, often dissociated from their awareness, into the analytic field, without being hindered by premature explanation, closure, and attribution.
It is a fundamental principal of interpersonal psychoanalysis that dissociated tendencies often underlie psychopathology. Sullivan (1940) wrote in