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Some of the reasons and some of the passions for using, or not using, the concept of projective identification are to be found in the history of the British Psychoanalytic Society. After the Controversial Discussions (finely chronicled by King and Steiner, 1991) held during the Second World War, the British Society divided itself into Classical Freudians, later known as the Contemporary Freudians; a Middle group, later called the Independents, and a Klein group, the Kleinians.
This division into three groups had its beginnings in a dispute over child analysis during the 1920s between Anna Freud in Vienna and Melanie Klein in Berlin. The dispute involved issues of transference, unconscious phantasy, the super-ego and the Oedipus Complex. Milton, Polmear and Fabricius (2004) describe how
Klein was glad to accept Ernest Jones's invitations, first in 1925 to lecture in the British Psychoanalytic Society, and then in 1926 to live in London. Klein was grateful for the warm and generally open-minded reception of the British somewhat distanced as they were from the analytic fray of mainland Europe.
They record the terrible circumstances that in 1938 forced Sigmund and Anna Freud to come to London as refugees from the Nazis –
books burned, Freud himself suffering from advanced cancer of the jaw. About the Classical Freudian group they write:
From 1933 many European refugee analysts were helped to settle in London … the emigres closest to Freud and his daughter … felt they had to protect the legacy of their mortally ill friend and teacher. For them Klein's ideas were not psychoanalytic at all; she was heretical in an analogous way to Jung or Adler.
But ‘Klein and close supporters … felt deeply that their developments were true to Freud's vision, and were dismayed at the prospect that they might even be expelled from the British Society’ (Milton et al., 2004, p. 65). Expulsion would have been a grim reversal of fortun