You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Although the title of this book includes the terms identification and projection, the book is really about projective identification. Projective identification is a term that not only defines a type of
mental mechanism, but also implies an approach to psychoanalytic technique and theory, and has psychoanalytic political implications. Some analysts live by it, and others find it meaningless. It is more widely used in the rest of the world than the United States, and is more commonly associated with the Kleinian and object relationship schools than ego psychology.
This relatively brief book offers the reader a good part of the spectrum of current views of the term “projective identification,” as well as several conceptions of projection and identification. Joseph Sandler has gathered the work of a distinguished group of psychoanalysts (W. W. Meissner, Betty Joseph, Otto Kernberg, Rafael Moses, Meir Perlow, and Yoram Bilu) who presented papers at a symposium in Israel in 1986 to an audience receptive to the idea of projective identification. The book consists of the papers and the ensuing discussions.
The work begins with a patented Joseph Sandler (with Meir Perlow) review of the concepts of internalization, externalization, projection, identification, incorporation, and projective identification. These first two chapters are like certain wonderful chocolate cakes—small, dense, tasty, and very rich. Sandler and Perlow distinguish between projection both as a mechanism of defense whereby mental contents are displaced from self-representation to object-representations, and as a process whereby the ego expels its own sadistic impulses into the external world and externalization which refers to the transformation of an intrapersonal conflict into an interpersonal one. Identification as a developmental process related to incorporation and the mental counterpart of the oral impulse with links to melancholia, superego formation, and character formation is distinguished from t