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In line with john seeley's (1967) view that “the future of psychiatry is bound up so much more with clarification of theory than with inventions of practice” (p. 65), I shall first submit in this paper that recent clarification of theory by Meltzer (1967) and his co-workers changes the practice of psychoanalysis in ways a mere invention could not. I believe that making projective identification a major configuration in the psychoanalytic process changes the concept of analyzability, and I shall illustrate what I feel is at issue regarding analyzability with material from the analysis of a young man.
Second, I shall discuss the relationship between violent projective identification and hate.
Specifically, Meltzer's clarification of theory, his spelling out the centrality of projective identification in the analytic process, has direct bearing on the concept of analyzability. Furthermore, this centrality assigns a fresh priority to “hate.” Within the conceptual framework of projective identification, hate achieves structural status. It is not viewed simply as a regressive phenomenon, or the sum of anti-libidinal forces, or a manifestation of instinctual diffusion. Hate becomes understood in the profound sense that, I believe, Freud was already describing in 1915 when he wrote “that love and hate, which present themselves to us as complete opposites in their content, do not after all stand in any simple relation to each other…. Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love [italics mine]. It derives from the narcissistic ego's primordial repudiation of the external world….” (p. 139).
As the first aim of love, Freud says, “we recognize the phase
of incorporating or devouring—a type of love which is consistent with abolishing the object's separate existence” (p. 138). Hate, however, according to Freud, is prior to this mode of doing away with an object. There is yet an older form of annihilating premised on hate, and it is activity in this mode which is reflected in