The idea of projective identification has aroused considerable interest among American psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, a process that is here described in two papers. The first, by Roy Schafer, is based on his very extensive knowledge of the various schools of thought in American psychoanalysis and their response to the idea of projective identification. The second, by Elizabeth Spillius, briefly reviews some of the considerable body of American psychoanalytic literature on the topic of projective identification. These two expositions are followed by three noteworthy papers. The first, by Arthur Malin and James Grotstein, is one of the earliest American papers on the topic of projective identification. The second, by Thomas Ogden, expounds his views on the topic about a decade later. The third paper, written for the present volume, presents the views of Albert Mason, a British analyst who settled in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, and whose views on the concept express both his British origin and his subsequent clinical experiences of projective identification with American patients.