On: Projective Identification

Dear Editors,

I should like to compliment Dr. Giovanni Goretti (2007) on her admirable and scholarly review of the concept of projective identification and her excellent enumeration of its various uses. She has studiously surveyed the vast landscape of this entity. Her grasp of the concept is noteworthy and includes a span of its normal and pathological implications as well as the genesis of its early development in the works of Klein, Rosenfeld, Bion, and others. She asked two major questions: is the concept too broad and over-inclusive as it now stands, and ‘to what extent is it possible to know reality without having recourse to projective identification’? (p. 403, original italics). I should like to suggest a brief reply to both questions.

In my own work on the subject, I suggested that the definition of projective identification should conform to Klein's original conception as an intra-psychic omnipotent phantasy involving part-objects, whereas I propose the term ‘projective trans identification’ for its intersubjective (transpersonal, whole object) manifestations (Grotstein, 2005). As an unconscious phantasy it subserves the mechanism of intra-psychic displacement of part-objects in unconscious phantasy (i.e. makebelieve), whereas in its whole object function some additional mechanism must be added for it to subserve unconscious communication between two real human individuals (whole objects). In that contribution I hypothesized that, even though one can speak about projecting into another person experientially or in unconscious phantasy, one cannot project in actual reality into another person metapsychologically, only into one's image (internal object) or representation of that person—and then seek to manipulate that image (part-object) via ‘sympathetic magic’ (confusing the whole object with the part-object) to control the whole object magically. When the object actually does respond, an additional factor may be at work, gesturing, nudging, or priming. Bion (