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Ever since Anna O defined the psychoanalytic treatment as a “talking cure,” the method of psychoanalysis has been identified with this suggestive description. Freud and Breuer (1893) enriched it further: “Language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ “(p. 8). We know that language-the exchanges that we know as free associations and interpretations-plays a major role in the psychoanalytic treatment. Language is the psychic vessel that the invisible argonauts we call internal objects use to travel from our mind to the Other, the outer world, in order to explore it and to interact with whatever they encounter in it.
This fact still fills me with wonderment: Images, thoughts, and affects can leave one's mind and journey on the wing of tiny bits of sound. Even more wondrous, they can be sent into another mind, a mind that can “read” these thoughts, “feel” these affects, and register foreign fantasies and be changed by them without even being conscious of it. We are used to speaking and listening, so we take for granted the amazing fact that language links the minds and the hearts of two separate individuals and allows them to exchange meanings. I have been a student of the role played by language in structuring human knowledge and communication, and for years I have been puzzled by many unsolved questions about how the meanings of one individual “penetrate” the psyche of another, that is, how these meanings make sense to him or her and how they elicit responses. Klein's concept of projective identification, enlarged and redefined by Bion as communication, helped me to solve aspects of this puzzle. It clarified that projective identification is the engine that opens the channels to interpsychic penetration, activating the capacity