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Although Melanie Klein's concept of projective identification has gradually entered the mainstream of psychoanalysis (e.g., Grotstein, 1981; Kernberg, 1987; Meissner, 1987; Ogden, 1982; Sandler, 1987), her theory of mental development within which projective identification is the key mechanism, is still, in many quarters, considered heretical. Projective identification as a process has, by and large, been lifted out of its basic developmental context.
Besides the concrete and phantasmagorical terms in which the theory is couched, which has a certain off-putting quality, there have been other, more political reasons why the acceptance of Klein's ideas has been, at times, fiercely resisted. For one thing she was a woman; for another she had absolutely no academic credentials, having had no formal training beyond high school, the Austrian gymnasium. In 1914 she happened to read On Dreams, Freud's (1901) abbreviated version of his dream book. She knew then what she wanted to do as a life's work. As was the case in the early days, and still is to some extent, she received her training informally, mostly through two brief analyses, one with Sandor Ferenczi and the other with Karl Abraham. By the mid-1920s, her new ideas were raising hackles in Berlin. After her analyst, protector, and champion, Abraham, died in 1924, her remaining in Berlin became all but untenable. With considerable help from Alix and James Strachey, Freud's translators, she was invited in 1925 to give a series of lectures on child analysis at the British psychoanalytic Institute. The lectures were very well received, and she was subsequently asked to join the Institute, which she did in 1926.
By the mid-1930s, Klein had established herself as the leading intellectual figure in the British Institute. However, with the influx into Britain during the