Chapter 15 A Brief Review of Projective Identification in American Psychoanalytic Literature

In this chapter I attempt to illustrate some of the general themes described by Roy Schafer (in Chapter 14) in his helpful overview of the work of American psychoanalysts on the concept of projective identification. The chapter is based partly on general reading and partly on information provided by Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (‘PEP’ CD-Rom).43 My brief survey suggests that although the interest of American psychoanalysts in the idea of projective identification began slowly, by the 1970s it had begun to quicken and by the 1990s nearly four times as many American as British authors were writing about the topic.

This surge of interest in projective identification coincided with increasing American interest in British object-relations theory, especially in the work of Winnicott, Fairbairn, Klein and Bion, and with the growth in American analysis of various sorts of relational, inter-personal and intersubjective approaches to the relationship between analyst and patient. At first, interest in projective identification was focused on the term itself – its meaning and possible usefulness or lack of usefulness. As time has gone on – it is now more than forty-five years since Malin and Grotstein wrote what I believe was the first American paper on projective identification – it seems to me

that the analysts and therapists who have been using the idea have been taking it more for granted. They tend to mention the term in the course of discussing other clinical or conceptual problems; sometimes they do not mention the term explicitly, although they seem to be using the idea. Perhaps this is a sign that the idea of projective identification has gradually come to be more accepted.

The European contributors to the present book have suggested that when a new psychoanalytic concept is adopted into a d