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As a first-year psychoanalytic candidate, I was introduced to Melanie Klein via a surprising and impressive pedagogical moment. We were discussing child development, and the instructor asked the innocuous-enough question: “Who can define projective identification?” Just as I was raising my hand, he cautioned, “If you can, you fail the course.” My instructor's point of view, universally embraced, represented an evident bias against Klein's propositions.
The antagonism has softened a good deal since I was a candidate in the early nineties, owing to the work of Roy Schafer and others, and a greater general familiarity in the United States with Kleinian concepts and practice. Despite this tacitly greater openness, however, stereotypes are still to be found, particularly about the way in which Kleinian analysts work with their patients.
Clinical work is what Michael Feldman depicts with astonishing richness and clarity in the essays contained in Doubt, Conviction, and the Analytic Process. Just as Freud asserted that instinct represents a demand on the mind for work, Feldman shows how each patient, through the complex mechanisms of projective identification and splitting, exerts a demand on the analyst's mind for work—and that the analyst's experience of this demand, and his or her capacity to think about it usefully and constructively, constitutes the work of analysis.
While profoundly attuned to the patients he describes, Feldman moves our attention from the patient to the patient/analyst pair, taking the encounter between patient and analyst as the focus of his efforts. He demonstrates that the analyst's responses are generated under the influence of the patient's state of mind, the nature of his or her anxiety, the quality of his or her object relationships, and the pressures s/he brings to bear on the analyst in the session. Feldman thereby shifts the analytic inquiry from the mind of the patient to the interplay between two persons, in what is sometimes referred to as