Chapter 5 Projective Identification: Back to the Future

I believe that Melanie Klein would be surprised by the interest her idea of projective identification has evoked, for she herself does not seem to have been particularly enthusiastic about it, at least not in her published work. I have been told, however, that Klein made much use of the concept in her teaching and supervision in the late 1950s (Gammill 1989) and she left a considerable number of unpublished notes about projective identification in her Archive.

In this chapter I will first describe Klein's own ideas about the concept, followed by a discussion of the way the idea has been developed and used by later Kleinian analysts in Britain.

Klein was not the first person to use the term ‘projective identification’ in a publication. It had been used by Edoardo Weiss in 1925 along with the idea of ‘introjective identification’, especially in the context of describing choice of sexual partner (Weiss 1925). Klein refers to Weiss's work in her book The Psychoanalysis of Children, although without noting his use of the terms projective and introjective identification (Klein 1932a: 250n; see also Massidda 1999; Steiner 1999). Marjorie Brierley also described the idea of projective identification in a paper called ‘Further notes on the implication of psycho-analysis: metapsychology and personology’ just before Klein published her paper ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (Brierley: 1945). In this paper Brierley says that ‘projective identification of

ego-ideal with outer object, human or abstract, would appear to be a feature of the economy of all fanatics … the pedestrian everyday charity that begins at home, as distinct from fanatical devotion of ultra-personal interests, may depend upon projective identification with a fairly well-libidinzed operative self ’ (p. 96). Brierley mentions projective identification again in a second paper in 1947. It looks as if considerable thinking and discussion of introjection, projection and