Chapter 1. Four Discussions

Questioner: I should like to hear you talk about the theory of projective identification.

Bion: I don't think there is much to be said beyond Melanie Klein's version – what she called an omnipotent phantasy; a phantasy that a person can split off feelings, thoughts and ideas he does not want and evacuate them into another person, more particularly into the mother, and more particularly still at a primitive stage of existence, namely, at the breast itself. Of course the infant doesn't do anything, nothing happens. But the infant feels as if it could do that, and feels that it gets rid of some characteristic which it doesn't like and then becomes afraid that that same characteristic is directed towards it by the other person – originally by the mother, or by the breast into which it projects it. The theory was not intended as a substitute for already existing psychoanalytic theories, but as an addition to them.

Q: You have used the term ‘bizarre bits’ to describe one aspect of projective identification. Could you elaborate on that?

B: I never intended it to be a technical term, but in discussing it with Melanie Klein I suggested that these bits which are supposed to be projected, these parts of oneself which one doesn't like, then become bits which are felt to exist, as it were, outside oneself. I think that would help to explain certain types of behaviour.