The Concept of Projective Identification

The introduction of the concept of projective identification by Melanie Klein in 1946 was set against a rather confused and confusing background of literature on various forms of internalization and externalization—imitation, identification, phantasies of incorporation and many varieties of projection. Projective identification is a broad concept, as the following description by Hanna Segal indicates.

In projective identification parts of the self and internal objects are split off and projected into the external object, which then becomes possessed by, controlled and identified with the projected parts. Projective identification has manifold aims: it may be directed towards the ideal object to avoid separation, or it may be directed towards the bad object to gain control of the source of danger. Various parts of the self may be projected in order to get rid of them as well as to attack and destroy the object, good parts may be projected to avoid separation or to keep them safe from bad things inside or to improve the external object through a kind of primitive projective reparation. Projective identification starts when the paranoid-schizoid position is first established in relation to the breast, but it persists and very often becomes intensified when the mother is perceived as a whole object and the whole of her body is entered by projective identification. (1973)

In this context Segal explicitly treats projective identification as a mechanism of defence, but elsewhere she describes it as ‘the earliest form of empathy’, and as providing ‘the basis for the earliest