Upgrade to PI.4, or rethinking projective identification from the vertex of the analytic field

The paper attempts to answer a key question: does the concept of projective identification (PI) still have a place in the metapsychology of post-Bionian analytic field theory (AFT)? Over time, PI has been characterized as increasingly interpersonal, especially as revised by Bion and Ogden. Beginning with the Barangers, writers on AFT have also spoken about what might best be called "crossing" PI as the foundation of the analytic field. However, on the one hand, they have understood this intersection negatively, as the basis of paired bastions or collusions; on the other hand, with Bion, they have always maintained a certain unidirectionality in writing that the flow of PI normally goes from the patient to the analyst, and can only occasionally be reversed. Strictly speaking, this notion clashes with the radically intersubjective idea that every fact of analysis is unconsciously co-created and represents a "character" in the analytic field or an affective hologram of the couple. The author suggests that this apparent contradiction can be resolved and, if properly rethought, PI can retain an important place in the metapsychology of AFT. If we consider the dialectic of recognition to be at the centre of therapeutic action, PI is the concept in psychoanalysis that best describes it. In order to highlight this theoretical and heuristic value of PI, the proposal is to re-read it in the light of some of Merleau-Ponty's concepts (chiasmus, entanglement, intercorporeality, flesh of the world, etc.) that emphasize the essentially social and embodied texture of subjectivity.