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Scott was the first psychoanalyst to use the term and to describe the phenomenon of projective identification. He did so in this paper when he presented it to the British Psycho-Analytic Society, 21 November 1934, as an associate member, elected 1933.
Melanie Klein's footnote in “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946, p. 102) said that Scott had “described three interconnected features which he came upon in a schizophrenic patient: a strong disturbance of her sense of reality, her feeling that the world around her was a cemetery, and the mechanism of putting all good parts of herself into another person—Greta Garbo—who came to stand for the patient.” She seemed to give Scott the credit for being the first person to name projective identification but then took it for herself instead when she wrote, “I suggest for these processes the term ‘projective identification’” (1946, p. 101) and “I suggested the term ‘projective identification’ for those processes that form part of the paranoid-schizoid position” (1957, p. 311).
It is even more perplexing to read in that same paragraph from 1957, “Phenomena well known in psychiatry, e.g., a person's feeling that he actually is Christ, God, a king, a famous person are bound up with projection.” This is the reverse of what Scott said. Scott's patient believed “Greta Garbo is me” (projective identification) not “I am Greta Garbo” (introjective identification). Klein is giving “I am Christ” as an example of projective identification instead of the correct “Christ is me.”
Phyllis Grosskurth interviewed Scott in 1981 (published in 1983) and asked him about those early days: