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With remarkable clinical evidence, the author has provided for us a ‘model of functioning’ of the analyst at work: one that allows us to watch, as though through a magnifying glass showing details of the texture, the course of a process involving both parties of the relationship. It shows, on the one hand, projective identification of the patient, who tends to ‘force’ upon the mind of the analyst, and in the therapeutic scenario, an organisation of her inner world and her mental functioning not only in order to communicate it, but also to impose it; and on the other side, the analyst's reverie function as he gathers, elaborates and restores her material, now transformed, back to the patient.
There is a remarkable internal coherence in this clinical material between the theory of mental functioning, the theory of the psychoanalytical process and the theory of technique. What the patient is told (technique) derives from how the mental functioning is understood (fundamentally, projective identification); similarly, the mental functioning described in these terms ‘places’ the analyst at the receiving pole (reverie) of the projective identification. The analyst can either recognise and elaborate what the patient tends to ‘force’ on him, thus building up a reverie for the growth and broadening of the meaning of what is happening in the analytic scenario, or he can act by ‘colluding’ with the patient's request, which would turn out to be antigrowth as well as parasitic for the analytic process.
Of course, we need to take into consideration the degrees of these two extremes, which ought not to be regarded as absolute, but rather considered in terms of a continuous oscillation between the two poles. An oscillation, however, with transformative effects, if it inclines more to the side of ‘good reverie’ rather than ‘collusion’.
But, why must ‘Ana’ ‘make a projective identification’? Why must she ‘force’ the analyst to respond seductively to her seduction, only to feel that the an