Response to Michel Sanchez Cardenas

I am grateful to Michel Sanchez Cardenas for this commentary on my work on projective identification. His contribution touches a raw nerve in our theorising: how to articulate – and then translate into coherent clinical tools – the tension between differentiation and identity. Put differently: how to hold together, without dissolving it, our nature as at once singular and plural.

The opening question is ancient but refuses to be sidestepped: at birth, does there exist an undifferentiated totality from which subjects gradually emerge, or do two distinct subjects already exist and only secondarily construct a shared space? My answer is that the alternative itself is badly framed. If we accept – as we so often proclaim, do we not always recite that the I is the other? – that the self can only come into existence through the other, then we must posit a thirdness from the very start: neither pure fusion nor pure separation, but an originary dialectic of identity and difference. The infant, then, cannot be considered in isolation. To understand how a subject comes into being, we must look at the system the child forms with the mother, with the caregiver: it is there, in that relationship, that the process of subjectivation has its stage.

From this follows a consequence that is often overlooked: that an infant without language can nonetheless gain access to the symbolic dimension. Preverbal communication between mother and child is not simply infra-symbolic – it is already, in its own way, within the register of the symbolic. The absence of verbal code does not equal the absence of meaning.

The problem with dialectic, as is well known, is that it collides with Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction. And yet psychic reality does not obey Aristotle: identity and fusion do not exclude each other – they co-exist. We may encounter subjects pathologically entrenched in their own singularity, unable to let themselves be traversed by the other; and we may encounter subjects who d