Biomedical subjects
James S Grotstein
Publications and source records attributed to James S Grotstein.
'Projective transidentification': an extension of the concept of projective identification.
Questions about the concept of projective identification still persist. The author presents the following hypotheses: Klein's traditional view and Bion's extension and revision of it can be thought of as occupying a continuum in reverse. He postulates that Bion's concept of communicative intersubjective projective identification (which the author renames 'projective transidentification') is primary and inclusive of Klein's earlier unconscious, omnipotent, intrapsychic mode but includes Bion's 'realistic' communicative mode as well. The author hypothesizes, consequently, that intersubjective projective identification constitutes both the operation of an unconscious phantasy of omnipotent intrapsychic projective identification solely within the internal world of the projecting subject--in addition to two other processes: conscious and/or preconscious modes of sensorimotor induction, which would include signaling and/or evocation or prompting gestures or techniques (mental, physical, verbal, posturing or priming) on the part of the projecting subject; followed by spontaneous empathic simulation in the receptive object of the subject's experience in which the receptive object is already inherently 'hard-wired' to be empathic with the prompting subject.
The seventh servant: the implications of a truth drive in Bion's theory of 'O'.
Drawing upon Bion's published works on the subjects of truth, dreaming, alpha-function and transformations in 'O', the author independently postulates that there exists a 'truth instinctual drive' that subserves a truth principle, the latter of which is associated with the reality principle. Further, he suggests, following Bion's postulation, that 'alpha-function' and dreaming/phantasying constitute unconscious thinking processes and that they mediate the activity of this 'truth drive' (quest, pulsion), which the author hypothesizes constitutes another aspect of a larger entity that also includes the epistemophilic component drive. It purportedly seeks and transmits as well as includes what Bion (1965, pp. 147-9) calls 'O', the 'Absolute Truth, Ultimate Reality, O' (also associated with infinity, noumena or things-in-themselves, and 'godhead') (1970, p. 26). It is further hypothesized that the truth drive functions in collaboration with an 'unconscious consciousness' that is associated with the faculty of 'attention', which is also known as 'intuition'. It is responsive to internal psychical reality and constitutes Bion's 'seventh servant'. O, the ultimate landscape of psychoanalysis, has many dimensions, but the one that seems to interest Bion is that of the emotional experience of the analysand's and the analyst's 'evolving O' respectively (1970, p. 52) during the analytic session. The author thus hypothesizes that a sense of truth presents itself to the subject as a quest for truth which has the quality and force of an instinctual drive and constitutes the counterpart to the epistemophilic drive. This 'truth quest' or 'drive' is hypothesized to be the source of the generation of the emotional truth of one's ongoing experiences, both conscious and unconscious. It is proposed that emotions are beacons of truth in regard to the acceptance of reality. The concepts of an emotional truth drive and a truth principle would help us understand why analysands are able to accept analysts' interpretations that favor the operation of the reality principle over the pleasure principle--because of what is postulated as their overriding adaptive need for truth. Ultimately, it would seem that Bion's legacy of truth aims at integrating finite man with infinite man.