Heroic Deeds, Manic Defence and Intrusive Identification: Some Reflections on Psychotherapy with a 16-Year Old Boy*

In this paper I should like to look at a particular aspect of adolescence, that is, the heroic stance as a defence against impotence, helplessness, dependency and depression. I propose to link the heroic flight into action with a particularly active and intrusive use of projective identification by my young patient. Projective identification was first defined by Melanie Klein. In “Notes on some schizoid mechanisms” she described a process of projective identification in which parts of the ego are forced into another's psyche in order to take over its contents or to control it (Klein 1946). This is a deeply unconscious process motivated by envy, and the result is a depletion of the subject and weakened sense of self and identity.

As an analytical psychologist, Michael Fordham was not working with the same model of the psyche as Klein. Nevertheless, he found her discoveries of the working of unconscious phantasy in children to be inspiring, and her descriptions of her clinical work helped him to gain direct access to the unconscious of his own child patients. He writes, “I recognised that what she wrote might be a basis for developing a Jungian understanding of child development” (Fordham 1989). Klein, following Susan Isaacs, distinguished between two kinds of fantasy: conscious fantasy that is directly accessible in daydreams and, for Jungians, in active imagination, and unconscious phantasy that is the psychic pattern that underlies instinctual activity. Two spellings of the word are used by Kleinians to help the reader recognise the distinction between conscious fantasy and unconscious phantasy and I shall follow this practice. Fordham regards Klein as one of his mentors, and the close correspondence between unconscious phantasy and archetypal patterns was the basis from which he extended Jung's idea of the self and individuation to apply to infancy and childhood. For this reason, the training in child analysis in London under Fordham's direction has assimilated a n