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It is not easy to avoid idealization when commenting on the work of highly esteemed clinicians and theoreticians in psychoanalysis, like Elizabeth Spillius (1983) and Edna O’Shaughnessy (1964). With their present book, the editors aim to (1) address the projective identification concept through the published and unpublished work of Melanie Klein, (2) present the evolution of the concept in different British Kleinian schools of thought, and (3) identify the fate of the concept in various psychoanalytic schools, throughout the world.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part consists of two chapters. In the first one, Elizabeth Spillius offers a historical account of the projective identification concept through the published versions of Klein's (1946) paper “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” as well as through some of her unpublished papers. The identification of the differences among projective identification, projection, and countertransference forms a substantial part of the first chapter. The first part of the book concludes with the reprinting of Klein's seminal paper “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” in which the early developmental anxieties of the paranoid-schizoid position are connected to the splitting process of the ego, the concomitant projective identification process, and the (more emotionally “mature”) depressive position. Furthermore, the projective identification defense is linked to the psychopathological structure of the schizoid personality, obsessional neurosis, mood disorders, and psychosis.
In the first chapter of the second part of the book, Elizabeth Spillius elaborates on the British Kleinian development of the projective identification concept. Spillius defines projective (formerly regarded as “bad”) and introjective (good) identifications as symbolic forms of unconscious fantasy, identifies the analyst's responses to the patient's projective identification, separates normal from pathological projective identification, and pinp