You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
While my remarks on Dr. Kurth's paper will be largely critical, I wish to state at the outset that I find the quality of thought and of analytic work implied in it very high indeed. In its structure it seems really to be two papers: one on the experience of one analyst in finding that the conceptualizing of projective identification in the transference has extended the range of his analytic work, and the second on a particular view of hate (“ontological”) which is felt to render it more discussible in structural terms. As only the first of these two parts relates very specifically to my own work, I will confine my remarks to it.
In my book The Psycho-analytical Process (1967) I have delineated “massive” projective identification from those other operations of the mechanism which occur, in keeping with Melanie Klein's description in her 1946 paper, where the central identity of the self is not involved. In her later paper “On Identification” (1955), using the Julian Green novel If I
Were You (1950), she took up this second issue. My own contribution was an exploration, or rather, the beginning of an exploration, of the nature of the confusional states other than altered sense of identity which accompany this “massive” projective identification. I also tried to reserve the problem of the “violence” of the intrusion into the object as a separate issue related to the degree of damage done to the object, the consequent severity of persecution, and the intensity of the depressive pain incipient to any reparative process. In his replacement of “massive” by “violent,” Dr. Kurth has undone this distinction and sacrificed a certain clarity in clinical description and differentiation.
Along with this loss, it is discernible that Dr. Kurth has also lost touch with the central significance in my choice of the term “geographical.” While I stressed the blurring of boundaries between self and object (the identity problem), I was interested in separating these off from certain phen