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Dear Sir
After reading Grinberg’s paper ‘Is the transference feared by the psychoanalyst?’ (IJPA, 78: 1-14, 1997), I reflected that the difficulties in handling counter-projective identification are much greater than those of transference. In spite of coining and studying that phenomenon for decades even Grinberg may be its prisoner! He could not focus on the patient’s manic denial of guilt for giving up dealing with her ‘untreatable’ father. Grinberg’s intuition guided him instead to his patient’s persecutory anxieties. Her simultaneous use of other primitive defenses (projection and projective identification) was actually producing a confusing mixture of paranoid, depressive and manic phenomena. Grinberg’s current hindsight regarding such an omission may now be of interest to us.
Matte Blanco’s (1975) bilogic may help to formulate more clearly what Grinberg grasped intuitively, but with a confused nonconceptual understanding. A brief overview of Matte Blanco’s theory follows. His formulations will be applied to the clinical situations in which Grinberg made his most decisive interventions.
Matte Blanco used the term ‘symmetrization’ to describe a basic characteristic of the logic of the Unconscious system. He described it as ‘selectively ignoring certain asymmetrical or difference relations’, whereby ‘it can operate as a defense’ (Rayner, 1995, p. 25). However, its function is ‘just to experience sameness’ (p. 25). We need both ‘sensitivity to sameness’ for recognition, and ‘difference discrimination’ for location: a refined combination of both is ‘necessary for survival’ (p. 27). Ryavec (1997) emphasised that Matte Blanco’s clinical theory focuses on similarity and difference. She explored how we see ‘similarity-with-a-difference’ around us all the time, moments in which we recognise elements of a repetitive situation combined with something else, so that the experience feels simultaneously the same and different. The lack of understanding of the primitive (Ucs.) pr