Projective Identification

An adolescent girl, aged 13, was in individual analytic psychodrama. The first months were marked by the enactment of one of her symptoms: a female voice would speak to her, making death threats and scornful insults. In the scenarios that she played out, she was in a state of confusion between two representations: that of her accusing mother and that of the attacking daughter. She sometimes seemed relieved and calm when this voice was embodied in a scene between a mother and a daughter played by two therapists or she was in collusion with one or both of them, in echolalia. Her sense of identity was far from being assured: a part of her psyche was entangled in fantasy with the representation of a bad mother. We may assume that this internal confusion stigmatised by this delusional voice was the result of projective identifications arising from links with a maternal imago that was itself struggling with a confusion of identity. The young girl in the psychodrama made desperate efforts to control this voice whose manifest expression emerged in the form of insults and scorn.

After a few months, she was able to internalise this voice and, caught off guard by her confusion, she talked for the first time about the role of a grandmother and her granddaughter to one and the same therapist. The “inheritance” of this voice then clearly appeared to contain the unconscious identifications of the bad mother with the unconscious offshoots of the grandmother's psyche, projected into the adolescent or reappropriated by her. Her maternal grandmother had been hospitalised on several occasions for delusional episodes, events that had stigmatised the maternal line of descent. This inherited voice of the offshoots of unconscious impulses persecuted the young girl from the inside, possessed her, but did not belong to her completely. It represented progress for this adolescent girl to be able to incarnate, that is to put outside herself, to project onto one and the same person, the confusion