You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dear Sir,
Some weeks ago, going through the book Conversazione sulla Psicoanalisi by G. Di Chiara and N. Pirillo (Liguori Editore, 1997), I read a bibliographical quotation which in my opinion constitutes an important linch-pin for reconstructing the truth about the controversial nature of projective identification. I immediately thought of writing to you, so that this reference could have the widest circulation through the International Journal, chiefly among the specialists of projective identification. But allow me some preliminary remarks.
In 1991 I presented to the Asociación Psicoanalítica de Buenos Aires a paper (unpublished) entitled ‘Identificación proyectiva: ¿término embrujado o término teórico heurístico?’ [Projective identification: bewitched term or heuristic theoretical term?]. Although the paper had a highly methodological thrust, I tried to point out as well a series of phenomena unrelated to the simple scientific debate, which led me to think that projective identification was a term marked by some mysterious witchcraft. For reasons of space, I'll quote only a few of them, which however are relevant to the aim of my letter.
In the psychoanalytical ambit, as well as in any scientific field, we all accept the praxis of putting a certain concept we are studying into its historical framework with clear and exact bibliographical references. This didn't happen with projective identification. On the contrary, a lot of omissions, misunderstandings and mistake occurred.
First of all we have to distinguish between the term and the concept of projective identification. Klein introduced both term and concept of projective identification in 1946, in her famous article ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (Int. J. Psychoanal., 27: 99-110). The way she did it was however very unusual, because she introduced the term almost en passant and without putting it in inverted commas, as if it were already a well-known term. In the summary and conclusions she also uses the ter