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I should like to thank Mrs. Hurry and Dr. Novick very much for such a stimulating paper, and to express my admiration for the thoughtful way they have tackled a difficult subject. The great amount of work they have obviously put into this paper makes it a very fitting opening to this Study Weekend.
I very much agree that terms such as projection and externalisation, and here I would add the Kleinian term projective identification, have all been used rather loosely, and with the stimulus of this interesting paper I hope that in our discussions this weekend we shall be able to make some progress in clarifying these terms.
It has been very useful to have such a concise summary of Freud's developing views on this subject, and it is clear that some of our divergencies have sprung from the fact that some writers have developed one aspect of Freud's thinking, others another. While Mrs. Hurry and Dr. Novick are in favour of sticking to Freud's later restriction of the term “projection”, writers such as Melanie Klein and W. R. Bion have followed up his earlier line of thought. While I agree that historical consistency, where possible, is important, I think we should remember Dr. Meltzer's advice to us at a recent meeting and not feel that we have to follow in Father's footsteps, but rather to use Freud's genius and work to stimulate our own thinking on the subject. How do we know which, if any, of Freud's views on projection he would stick to if he were here now?
I personally feel reluctant to restrict the term “projection” to a defence against the drives. It seems to me more in keeping with English dictionary usage and academic psychology to keep the word projection itself as a more general term to denote a mode of thinking or mental mechanism which can refer to drives, ideas, feelings, parts of the personality or internal objects, and can also vary in intensity, extensiveness and motive. Projection would then enter into a variety of clinical phenomena which should be further