You Can Get Here from There

Note:

This reply is only/largely to the first, main part of Leite's (2018) response to my paper. A reply to the second, which criticizes the use of the imagination in the account, has to be left aside for reasons of space. What more, following Wollheim, I have to say about the imagination and its relation to identification, can be found in Braddock (2012).

Originally, my paper was organized around the above title (but suppressed by the Editor!), my meaning being that, on the one hand, the paper showed how to 'translate out' projective identification from its hermetic psychoanalytic usage (thus getting 'here' from 'there') by combining philosophical analysis and the 'extension of ordinary psychology' approach. This would enable the ordinary person to get quite a lot of the way to an understanding of projective identification (getting 'there' from 'here'), something that many psychoanalysts see as important, but difficult to do. At the same time, the title was also intended to show that it is possible to retrieve an intelligible thesis about unconscious communication from what analysts write about projective identification in their vocabulary, and what, as they claim, occurs in the sorts of interactions Leite describes in his response to my paper.

My initial response to Leite is to say that his remarks give me the opportunity, and the opening, to say a number of things that had to be left out of "Understanding Projective Identification," or that appeared in a perhaps over-compressed form in my Introduction, and thus to make explicit what was all along the implicit project of the paper: to speak to the lay audience of those who find psychoanalytic claims in general, and consequently find the concept of projective identification in particular, at best unsupported and at worst incomprehensible, and so write them off. I am, that is, ambitious to help those who are bemused, to understand projective identification, and to show those who are disposed to reject psychoanalysis wholesale that there is a way to make at least this part of it intelligible. (I am also ambitious to explain psychoanalytic concepts such as projective identification within an analytic philosophical framework and without opting for either deflation or an eliminitivistic reduction to neuroscience. Finally, I am also ambitious to provide an entry point for psychoanalysis into those social sciences that recognize a place for psychoanalytic methodology and theory but are ill-served by the empirical indeterminacy of Lacanian theory. Further, the psychoanalytic theory I have in mind is post-Kleinian theory, which in my view is both a powerful and theoretically productive contemporary theory embodying what is essential in Freud's own, by now historical theory, and is also exceptionally well-grounded in a method of observation developed by precisely the school of analysts on which Leite himself draws.)

Leite, unusually for a philosopher in the analytic tradition, is knowledgeable about what it is that contemporary psychoanalysts think and do. He draws on this knowledge for the psychoanalytical case material that he adduces as counterexample evidence to my argument; the clinical material he cites is of both verbal and nonverbal behaviors described by psychoanalysts as the basis on which their attributions of projection and projective identification are made or, as he puts it, they judged projective identification to be 'actualized.' In my Introduction, I noted that such behaviors are indeed modalities for projective identification. I concur that both the sorts of case cited by Leite, and also importantly the bizarre verbal and nonverbal behaviors described by Bion, Meltzer, and other analysts working with psychotic patients, are indeed the sorts of clinical observation that need to be addressed and given theoretical clarification. My strategy in using the 'extension of ordinary psychology' approach is to get as far as possible with it and the resources of philosophy, and to clarify those areas where a contribution from psychoanalysis is both needed, and needs to be philosophically clarified albeit in ways that may put pressure on philosophy itself; the 'extension of ordinary psychology' approach is such as to reach a limit in explaining psychoanalytic phenomena, and beyond which it is psychoanalytic theory itself, which...