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Note: In order to facilitate references made earlier in the book to quotations appearing in this Appendix, the quotations on the following pages have been numbered.
Definition of the concept; its beginning and development. Melanie Klein proposed the name ‘projective identification’ (we shall abbreviate it as PI) to refer to a psychological mechanism which: (1) ‘is based on the splitting of the ego and the projection of parts of the self, into other people’ (Klein 1963: 103). At various times she devotes long paragraphs to its description, while at other times she adds a new element to it, almost in passing, in phrases which, though short in themselves, have gradually accumulated and made it possible to understand the process more clearly.
As Klein herself points out, the origin of the concept goes back to the beginning of her studies:
(2) ‘Already in my paper “An Obsessional Neurosis in a Six Year Old Girl”, which was read in 1924 but not published until it appeared in The Psycho-Analysis of Children, envy bound up with oral-, urethral- and anal-sadistic attacks on her mother's body played a prominent role. But I had not related this envy specifically to the desire to take away and to spoil the mother's breasts, although I had come very near to these conclusions. In my paper “On Identification” (New Directions in Psycho-Analysis), I discussed envy as a very important factor in projective identification.’