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This book represents a real challenge to anyone who thinks that they have a satisfactory theory, that they know what they mean by their terminology, or that they mean what they say within that terminology. A book whose first impression is rather prosaic and unprepossessing induces a sense of vertigo when one tries to marshal an overview of its content.
The content is described by its editor as the ‘first-fruits of the First Conference of the Sigmund Freud Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’. It contains a core of five papers, three concerned directly with projective identification and two others, one on political process and another on Dybbuk Possession. The central issue is whether projective identification has any status as a concept and if so to what extent. This is disputed three ways between Meissner, an American ego psychologist, Betty Joseph, a Kleinian informed by Bion, and Kernberg, an American ego psychologist deeply influenced by British object relations theorists, and especially by Kleinian and post-Kleinian thought. These designations of school are important not only intellectually but also emotionally. There is throughout the book a palpable sense of the group dynamic which informs not only the conference out of which it arose, but the larger institution of psychoanalysis as a whole on both sides of the Atlantic. It is one of the strengths of the book that the discussions of the papers are included, not only for the richness of their debate, but also because they allow the emergence of the often acrimonious institutional dynamic with such clarity.
The last two papers, by Moses on the relation of projection, introjection and projective identification to political process, and by Bilu on Dybbuk Possession in relation to the mechanisms of internalisation and externalisation, seemed at first reading to feel somewhat out of place until seen in the context of the group and institutional dynamic to which I have referred and to which I will return late