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In ironic counterpoint to Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum, Paul Valéry (1938, 585) articulates a profound insight: thought, by definition, isolates differentiated elements and relates them to one another, distancing itself from the primary and holistic immediacy of lived experiences.
Psychoanalysis – as its very etymology suggests1 – also extracts units of meaning from the psychological situations we experience, in other words, from our phenomenological being. Vibert (2018, 26) reminds us: “We have experiences, original, elementary lived experience that precedes all the intellectual constructs used by reflection to describe them” and “We cannot conceive the world as being separate from us” (27).
Civitarese brings projective identification (PI) into relationship with this phenomenological level. He shows that PI is a fruitful concept if it is compared with the Barangers’ notion of the “field”, that is, within the framework of a we-ness (2025, 232) where fusion occurs, particularly with the object world. He cites Merleau-Ponty (1969): “My body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived) (248)” … “things are the prolongation of my body and my body is the prolongation of the world” (255). According to Civitarese, PI plays out simultaneously in the separation of a subject and an object and, moreover, in their fusion: “because by definition there is no ‘I’ without a certain fusion with the ‘Other’ or without ‘we’” (232, emphasis added). And he adds: “Adopting the trick of seeing something as co-created does not meld two subjectivities into a homogeneous whole lacking differences” (232, emphasis added).
However, I would like to qualify this statement: in my view, the separate elements (the subject and the object in relation) cannot fully finalise the asymptote that would see them merged, even though it brings them closer together. Indeed, either the subject and the object (of the PI in particular) are distinct, or they are one, but these two polarities never conver