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A paper reflecting on and attempting to elucidate aspects of projective identification is welcome, for our understanding of this ubiquitous, complex and multiform concept can always benefit from further thought.
As analysts we respond emotionally, contain, transform and more, not the patient's actual projections but an approximation of them that derives from our own internal life, in our own complex processes of identification with our inner objects. Given that the subject can only project into the image of the object, not the object itself, Grotstein hopes to explore some of the ways in which the object (the mother or the analyst, for example) can have emotional responses that correspond to the emotional conditions of the person who is employing projective identification (for instance the baby or the patient). Thus it is his aim to consider the processes that occur within the object of the projective identification.
He begins by clarifying some important questions that arise in connection with the concept: ‘Is there a difference between projection and projective identification? When a patient uses projective identification does he actually project himself into the object or into his internal image of the object, and, if the latter, how can we explain the object's response to the projective identification?’ These are questions with which analysts have struggled for many years and it is always helpful to have them opened up.
He makes certain clear distinctions between Klein's and Bion's ideas on projective identification. In Grotstein's analysis, Klein's is a ‘one-party model’ (Klein 1946, 1955) while Bion's is a ‘two-party relationship’ (Bion 1959, 1962). He describes a fundamental difference between projective identification as an intrapsychic phantasy and as a transaction between two people in the outer world. This is the case, however, only from a vertex of external reality, for Klein's model is quintessentially a two-party model. We are always in some form of relat