A Letter in Response to Berlin and Berlin

Abstract

I enjoyed reading Berlin and Berlin’s (2022) article in this issue. It offers an accessible and helpful process for understanding and working with projective identification as the interpersonal dynamics of transactions and games occur in the consulting room. The authors continue the tradition of self-analysis of the countertransference in service of the client that was started in TA by Novellino (1984) and continued by, for example, Hargaden and Sills (2002), Hargaden (2010), Little (2013), Mazzetti (2013), Stuthridge (2015), Cornell (2019), and Stuthridge and Sills (2016, 2019). What’s more, following Berne’s stricture that every theory should have a diagram, they have offered not one but several diagrams with which they map the dynamic, relational nature of the therapeutic encounter. The article spurred me to do something that Hargaden and I have thought about doing for many years—namely, to clarify the words we used in our early writings to describe the nature of the transferential relationship that we called the transformational countertransference, one of the three domains of transferential relating for which we were honored in 2007 with the Eric Berne Memorial Award. Berlin and Berlin critique our work (Hargaden & Sills, 2001, 2002) in relation to two aspects. The first is that we used the term “projective identification” (pi) synonymously with the transformational domain of transferential relating, which appears to exclude the possibility that pi might occur in the other domains. In this respect, I think their criticism is well-founded, although I think subsequent writing by both of us has clarified our meaning. Projective identification can occur in any cotransference in the sense of one person inducing or inviting another to resonate with or feel an aspect of their own experience, in other words, to take a complementary role in a transaction. Berlin and Berlin demonstrate well how the process forms part of what we would call the projective transferential domain (Hargaden & Sills, 2002). However, when we were developing our ideas in the late 1990s, we were searching for a way to describe a level of intersubjective exchange that is so deeply unconscious and nonverbal that it cannot be easily identified with a two-person interaction, that is, a game. We were referring to primitive levels of relational connection that involve the therapist in feeling and containing an entirely unconscious aspect of the client, who cannot recognize it in themself but comes to recognize it in the therapist. The therapist allows it to reverberate with some part of their own human experience. Indeed, it is the vulnerability of the therapist that demands of them to connect with deeply uncomfortable parts of self in order to be able to think about and start to understand the client. As Hargaden (2010) wrote: