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Dear Editors,
It seems that Dr Aguayo and I have different theoretical interests. In my paper published in the IJP (Goretti, 2007, pp. 387-405), I intended to delve into the concept of projective identification, being impressed by the multiplicity and incommensurability of its meanings and uses. In the opening of his letter, Dr Aguayo seems to appreciate this aspect of my article.
Yet Dr Aguayo proves to be more interested in reconstructing the genealogy of the concept, or, in his words, in ‘helping us establish truer analytic contexts of discovery’. An interest he shares, I think, with Dr Massida, with whom I had an interesting email exchange on the occasion of my paper's publication and whose letter on the same subject was published by the IJP (Massida, 1999, p. 365). According to Dr Aguayo (and also Dr Massida), it is historically important to appraise the additional contributions of Melanie Klein's analysands—namely Rosenfeld, Bion and Segal—in the numerous revisions we detect in Klein's 1952 text as compared with the 1946 text. I regret that this did not receive enough attention in my paper (in which I no more than simply mention authors quoted by Dr Aguayo), and I thank him very much for pointing this out to me.
It is more difficult for me to agree with Dr Aguayo when he writes that ‘It was Klein who benefited from Rosenfeld's work’. In the fervour of ideas of that time -when the possibility of using psychoanalysis to cure or understand psychosis gained importance among psychoanalysts—I cannot think of any one linear, unipersonal benefit.
May I add the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which seem suitable to the topic of the letter? ‘Las ideas no son de nadie. Andan volando por ahí, como los ángeles’ (Del Amor y Otros Demonios, 1994).