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This paper is an addendum to, and in some ways a correction of, an earlier paper of mine (Rycroft 1985) in which I suggested that some people aspire, sometimes successfully, to become psycho-analysts in order to deny the psychical reality of their actual parents and to replace them by surrogate parents of their own choosing. Such people, I argued, ablate the images of their parents and replace them by those of their training analyst and supervisors, and trace their ancestry not from their actual forebears but from the dynasty founded by Freud when he created the psychoanalytical movement.
In this present paper I shall suggest that some analysts succeed in retaining or recovering their infantile sense of omnipotence by means of projective identification; that they attribute to, project onto, their training analyst (or, if he or she is hopelessly uncharismatic, some other revered analyst) their own infantile sense of omnipotence, identify with this idealised recipient of their own projections, and thereby recapture, re-introject, their infantile sense of omnipotence.
In arguing this idea I shall start not from Melanie Klein's and Herbert Rosenfeld's writings on projective identification but from the paper in which, according to Rosenfeld, the concept of projective identification first appears in the psychoanalytical literature.* This is Otto Fenichel's Trophy and Triumph, which was first published in German in 1939 and in English in the Second Series of his Collected Papers (Fenichel 1955).
In the first section of this paper Fenichel observes that children retain a belief in omnipotence long after the loss of their own sense of it and do so by regarding as omnipotent their parents, the very persons who have so seriously limited their own. In other words, the infant's illusion of his own omnipotence is followed by, replaced by, the illusion of parental omnipotence. Fenichel then goes on to say that this leads to an attempt by the child to seize power from the omnipotent p