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It is a pleasure to read a constructively comparative paper, particularly when the author writes as an insider—from the “empathic-introspective position” of not only one, but both perspectives under scrutiny. Sands, a self-described relational clinician “whose work is grounded in self psychology,” demonstrates a good feel for the nuances of working within the frameworks of both self psychology and the relational orientation. She tellingly describes projective identification as the analyst's visceral experience of the patient, an “emotional exchange of body fluids,” which gratifies the patient's selfobject wish to be received and understood from the inside out. Sands writes convincingly about how and why the self-psychological lens “obscures” the role of these countertransferential analyst-patient communications in the analytic process.
I would amplify her sensible observation that self psychology “brings its own transference—its own organizing principles—to the psychoanalytic situation and thus creates its own reality” by noting that the same is certainly true of each of our theories—and the point bears restating.
Sands concludes that projective identification could be comfortably assimilated into the theoretical web of self-psychological constructs by being considered a function of a particular selfobject developmental need to “communicate certain unformulated affective experience through the other's experience, in order to explore vicariously and integrate intolerable aspects of self.” I disagree with this conclusion.