Working Through in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: An Alternative and Complementary Path

According to analyst Peter Giovacchini (1986), “the poorest understood” and “the two most enigmatic words in psychoanalysis are ‘working through.’” Transference as traditionally conceptualized is at the core of this working-through process for psychoanalysis and derivative psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Yet, this projective process is limited by what chords the therapist activates within the patient, unpredictably influencing what the patient projects onto and reenacts with the therapist. This process, with projective identification at its core, has had to carry the burden of working through. As expressed by Freud (1914), “This working through of the resistances may in practice turnout to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience for the analyst.”

Were it possible, few would argue the value of an additional path of direct working through with the images of original family members, which are very much alive in the patient's mind according to object-relations theorists. As expressed by Sandler (1990), “internal objects can be regarded as the source of internal ‘presences’ with which the person constantly unconsciously interacts.” The presentation of a second phase of the working-through process, with introjective identification as its core, is the subject of this paper. “Introjective identification,” the term introduced by Ferenczi (1909), has not achieved clear conceptualizations as has “projective identification,” the term introduced 37 years later by Melanie Klein (1946).

Clarifying the term is necessary to appreciate the unique property of introjective identification processes introduced shortly in this paper. To the first term “introjection” is added “identification” because only this second term involves internalization as part of the self-subdivision rather than object-subdivision of the ego, and thus can materially modify the