Burial and resurgence of projective identification in French psychoanalysis.

Curiously enough, the concept of projective identification was ignored, and even rejected in France for at least two decades after the publication of the founding texts of Melanie Klein and Herbert Rosenfeld. This rejection was due to a critique from child psychoanalysts close to Anna Freud and also from the teaching of Lacan: the first took the real mother-child relation extensively into account, while the latter only saw the internal object as a signifier. The fact that during this period the countertransference was a concept reduced to its negative content no doubt explains this deliberate ignorance.

[Emotions and affect in psychoanalysisis].

The goal of this paper is to give some indications on the concept of affect in psychoanalysis. There is no single theory of affect, and Freud gave successive definitions, which continue to be deepened in contemporary psychoanalysis. We review some steps of Freud works on affect, then we look into some present major questions, such as its relationship to soma, the nature of unconscious affects and the repression of affect, which is particularly developed in the field of psychoanalytic psychosomatic.