“Is this chair alive?”

This chapter offers a contemporary Kleinian viewpoint on therapeutic action. Here, Seth Aronson highlights the therapist’s use of reverie to provide containment for the child’s projections, while also depicting the therapeutic relationship as inherently interpersonal. From this perspective, meaning is created by the mutual exchange of projections. Most notably, what Aronson terms “positive projective identification” allows the child to begin to integrate previously dissociated aspects of self, as well as between self and other. These ideas are illustrated in the detailed account of his work with four-year-old Noah.