On Lafarge's Paper "The Imaginer and the Imagined": To Know the Other, to be Known by the Other, to be Owned/Disowned by the Other.

This paper elaborates on Lucy LaFarge's thought-provoking paper "The Imaginer and the Imagined," focusing on how projective identification shapes unconscious phantasies within the analytic relationship. It argues that in narcissistic patients early phantasies of being known (imagined) by the primary object, together with the wish to know the object's phantasies about oneself, may-when dominated by excessive projective identification-undermine the experience of separateness between self and other. Instead, they become conflated with a phantasy of owning and being owned by the object. This might be particularly relevant in cases where there is felt to be a narcissistic mother who could not tolerate an infant that is different from her. The patient's confusion between the capacity to know another person while preserving an area of unknowability, and the omnipotent phantasy of completely knowing, possessing, and controlling the other, obliterates a sense of separateness and forecloses the potential for genuine imagination and creative exchange. This paper explores the various means through which such states are communicated and enacted within the analytic relationship, including forms of non-verbal communication. A brief clinical vignette is presented to illustrate these dynamics and their implications for psychoanalytic work.