Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1998 12:12:56 -0700
Subject: Re: beyng & irony


Malcolm Riddoch wrote:

> Yes, we need to get in contact with some infant Daseins then, or maybe
>
> theorize about our own infancy? I don't mind Klein's interpretations
> though, she's the definitive psychodynamic theorist for me. A
> brilliant
> theorist don't you think?

She gets hit pretty hard for "backing into" her notions of child
psychology for just the reason I stated (how does she know? is the
question -- she would see a behavior and say 'Oh...that's because...').
But it was her idea about Projective Identification (or, actually, later
renditions of this) that eventually helped throw me into Heidegger. The
suggestion with P.I. is that someone can actually insert some of his own
"inner content" into someone else (or, visa versa, one can sort of
experience what is going on 'inside' someone else). And this pops up in
psychotherapy in funny ways as  "transference" issues. People line of on
two sides of a fence. On the one side are those who feel that we are
each encapsolated psyche's and there isn't any of this direct
transferrence of one intra-psychic content into another's psyche. On the
other side there are those (Bion, Swartz-Salant, Ogden) who think there
there is such a transference. The problem for those who think there is
such a transference (based on Klein's original thinking about how an
infant controls its mom) is to find a scientifically acceptable
mechanism to account for such a thing. Since there ain't no such
mechanism, the whole affair generally revert to talk about soul and
spirit and anima mundi and such, and causes all kinds of interesting
problems. The really neat problem is when a therapist makes decisions
based on his presumed ability to determin what sort of intrapsychic
"content" is being generated by him, and what is being generated by the
client and "inserted" into him. Many of the issues of inner/outer,
subject/object ontology came right out of this stuff and slapped me
across the face.

Michael Staples



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