It can easily be appreciated from this selective review that the concept of projective identification has been applied across a broad spectrum of contexts and situations, which serves to dilute its meaning and to lend considerable imprecision to its usage. The argument I have presented here leads to the conclusion that analytic thinking would be much better off by abrogating the usage of the term or, at least,

restricting it to a specific connotation which implies the projection of elements of the self into the object and the experiencing of these self-elements (whether of the whole self or part of the self) as belonging to the object. This usage takes in the loss of self-object differentiation and implies that the process is psychotic in nature.