Discussion of Frederick Kurth's Article, Projective Identification, Analyzability, and Hate

I have read Dr. Kurth's paper with pleasure and interest, and I agree with its main thesis: that a deep understanding of projective identification, particularly of the “ontological” hate which can be expressed in it, does add greatly to the power of analytic therapy. It is, I take it, “ontological” in the sense that Melanie Klein felt it to result from a primal envy of life and creativity, which she linked with the “death instinct.” Moreover, she thought it innately present in different degrees in different individuals. But perhaps its commonest clinical manifestation occurs when the mother or analyst does not understand and receive that projective identification of bad feelings which is the baby's “inalienable right”; for then, just as in former days a beleaguered city which did not surrender by a certain time was considered fit only for assault, murder, and rape, so the baby, or patient, in fantasy violently enters to destroy, and may then feel itself imprisoned in a dead mother or analyst and unable to get out.

As to the analyzability of a patient under conditions of violent projective identification depending on the ego state of the analyst and not on the co-operation of a patient who, for the time being, cannot co-operate, I would suppose this to be in part the result of a more general difficulty, namely, that no analyst can be fully successful in dealing with something in a patient with which he is not fully familiar in himself. If so, the awareness of this difficulty is surely a recurring problem each time we begin to see “as through a glass darkly” the next insight we may be about to gain from the infinite depths of the unconscious.