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

The differences between the Kleinian and the contemporary Freudian structural schools have been amply discussed elsewhere. To the proponents of the former, the studies of Meltzer on projective identification, here elaborated by Kurth, may offer opportunities for a clarification of theory and practice. For the latter, their basic criticisms of the Kleinian school remain unchanged—i.e., the fixation on a mythology of the infantile mind which is made retroprojectively to harbor the maturer functional capacities and adaptive experiences of the personality. The oversimplified and distorted Kleinian mechanisms constitute a closed system of ideas which confirm each other, exclude alternatives, and are not susceptible to external validation.

I shall illustrate the latter viewpoint by an appraisal of one of Dr. Kurth's cases. We are told that “prismatically” (not structurally!), violent hate-impelled projective identification involves “envy, persecutory anxiety, possessive jealousy, deficiency

of trust, intolerance of separation, etc.” These tendencies are supposedly present in the mind of the infant and are sufficiently explained in terms of the instincts and a “primordial” rejection of the external world. Apparently no history of individual development is necessary, and we receive none. The contemporary adjustments of the patient, mentioned in passing, are merely a façade through which the persistent primordial nucleus may be discerned, and appear to be the sole determinant of behavior.

Thus there is no need for the differentiation of individual personality types or neuroses. In introducing us to the patient, we are assured that the circumstance that he is psychotic may be considered “irrelevant.” No doubt the converse applies in other cases—in fact, the great merit of the newly promulgated concept of violent projective identification appears to lie in the fact that the common remarks of analysands (“I was thinking about what you said in yesterday's hour”; “I really wante