Afterword

The idea of projective identification, of which there were forerunners in the writings of Freud and others, emerged as a distinct concept within the language of psychoanalysis in Melanie Klein's paper ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ in 1946 (see Chapter 2). In this book we chart the further evolution of the concept in the work of British Kleinians, and also its acceptance, rejection and alteration by analysts of different psychoanalytic persuasions in Britain, Europe, and in North and South America.

So widespread an interest in a new concept is unusual. It is due, we think, to the illumination projective identification can offer of central features of the clinical situation in the formation of transference and countertransference between patient and analyst. In the future it will be interesting to see what becomes of the concept as psychoanalysis develops further in Eastern Europe and Russia, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Far East.

In our view, the concept of projective identification is not particular to the clinical situation but a universal of human communication, one that Freud was questing for. In 1915 in his paper ‘The Unconscious’, he writes: ‘It is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs. of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Cs. This deserves closer investigation’ (Freud, 1915b, p. 194). And later, in 1933, he again describes this process.

There is, for example, the phenomenon of thought-transference […] It claims that mental processes in one person – ideas, emotional states, conative impulses – can be transferred to another

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person through empty space without employing the familiar methods of communication by means of words and signs.

We think that the concept of projective identification gives a name to, and a clarification of, the dynamics of direct communication and the phenomena of transference and countertransference that are universal among humankind.