Projective Identification and Countertransference: A Brief Commentary on their Relationship

PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION IS A CONCEPT that has undergone a sea-change in its purported meaning. First described by Tausk (1919) as the mechanism behind the influencing machine, it was alluded to in other terms by Freud in his papers, "On Narcissism" (1914), and "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" (1921). It was Klein who formally defined the concept after finding so much evidence for the presence of this mechanism in primitive mental life and in the play therapy of children. She at first was aware of it as projection, per se, a well known mechanism from the earliest days of psychoanalysis and associated it with the infant's desire to rid itself of its aggressive impulses (Klein, 1921). In 1946, however, Klein elevated projection, an instinctual mode, to projective identification, an object-relations (and especially a part -object relations) mode of relating. Since then there have been debates between Kleinians and non-Kleinians, particularly Americans, over whether there is a distinction between projection and projective identification. Non-Kleinians, who, in general, are unfamiliar and/or untrained in primitive part-object relations are usually unable to appreciate the Kleinian conception that there can be no projection without the translocation of the projecting subject's identification.

Klein's (1946) initial use of the concept corresponded with her version of Freud's (1911) concept of the purified pleasure ego in