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Doctors Zinner and Shapiro are to be commended for their contributions to the psychoanalytic understanding of the determinants of family group behaviour and its effect on adolescent development. Their recent paper (Zinner & Shapiro, 1974) can be more fully appreciated in the context of their earlier work. Although the authors have concentrated on adolescence wherein the interaction of members of a disturbed family vividly demonstrates their dynamic formulations, they affirm that the same basic formulations apply to children of all ages. Parental behaviour which conveys to a child the parent's image of him determined more by the parent's defensive needs than by the realistic attributes of the child has been termed 'defensive delineations'. Zinner & Shapiro have focused on a particular form of defensive delineation–projective identification. This concept functions as a bridge between individual and interpersonal psychology because it alters the subject's behaviour toward the object by changing his perception of the object and reciprocally of himself. Consequently, projective identification can lead to lasting structural change in the child who is the object via his identification with the distorted parental percepts.
A crucial factor in the effect of a projective identification is what is projected. 'Whole objects, part-objects, drive representations, ego ideal, superego elements all have been identified as the projected elements of the personality.' (Zinner & Shapiro, 1972). In this respect it is useful to employ the differentiation between externalization of aspects of the self representation and the projection of drive derivatives proposed by Novick & Kelly (1970). They suggested that 'externalization' be reserved for the former and 'projection' for the latter. This differentiation has important conceptual and therapeutic implications for the observations upon which today's paper is based.
Externalization is more successful in relieving a parent's discomfor