Foreword

When the term ‘projective identification’ was introduced into the language of psychoanalysis in 1946, there already existed a rich though unsystematised harvest of knowledge about identification. Freud himself had described the primary identifications of the ego with its objects, and also how some identifications can divide or impoverish the ego, e.g., hysterical, multiple and group identifications, while others, like the narcissistic identifications with the object in melancholia, alter the ego in complex morbid ways, and furthermore, how the identifications that form the super-ego and the ego ideal structure the mind and cause the ego anxiety through their judgments of guilt and demands, even as they enrich the personality with ideals. In The Language of Psychoanalysis Laplanche and Pontalis wrote that in ‘Freud's work the concept of identification comes little by little to have the central importance which makes it, not simply one psychical mechanism among others, but the operation itself whereby the human subject is constituted’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 206).

Abraham and Ferenczi also contributed to the notion of identification, and Anna Freud noted a defence mechanism of identification with the aggressor. But it was Melanie Klein who extended the concept in a far-reaching way. She conceived of identification as creating a whole inner world from the beginning of life, through introjection and projection, so that the ego has, as she expressed it, ‘an orientation outwards and inwards’ with ‘a constant fluctuation between internal and external objects and situations’ (Klein, 1945,

p. 409). And then in 1946 in ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ she described another form of identification, projective identification (in contradistinction to introjective identification), a defence mechanism used by the early ego in states of anxiety when, in an omnipotent phantasy, it splits off and projects parts of itself into the object with consequent identifications f