Projective Identification Reassessed: Commentary on Papers by Stephen Seligman and by Robin C. Silverman and Alicia F. Lieberman

The Creation of A Bridge Between Melanie Klein'S (1946, 1955) once arcane, recondite, and phantasmal conception of projective identification and current empirical infant development research constitutes a landmark in the integration of psychoanalysis with empirical research. The first bridge was forged by Wilfred Bion (1959, 1962) in his formulation of maternal reverie, the container, and the contained, in which he decisively lifted Klein's idea from its strictly intrapsychic moorings as a strictly unconscious infantile phantasy to the status of a necessary (for the infant) mode of communication of affects. The next step had to come from infant development research. Dr. Seligman's paper goes a long way in its laudable attempt to close the gap between the current tenets of postmodern intersubjective psychoanalytic concepts and those of Klein and her followers by continuing the trend started by Bion.

Drs. Silverman and Lieberman have written a poignantly graphic psychoanalytic “documentary” for the now burgeoning literature on trauma and abuse, a theme that challenges the foundations of the still highly intrapsychic orientation of psychoanalysis. The smoke and din of the ancient ecclesiastic wars between Anna Freud and Klein and between Klein and her erstwhile supervisee, John Bowlby, are cleared away, and in their wake another generation of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists is, without the pressures of religious and tendentious