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The concept of projective identification (PI) seems to become increasingly indispensable as an important contribution to theories on primitive communication and on object relations. The concept was coined by Melanie Klein (1946), but today it is not used exclusively in Kleinian circles. Most recently, Joseph Sandler and Otto Kernberg have contributed to the clarification of the concept (Sandler, 1987).
When you read through the literature on projective identification, you can point out three general areas of difficulty. The first is that the phenomenon is supposed to exist on widely different levels. Kohut (1971) and Meissner (1980) claim that it is always a psychosis-near mechanism. Others, and among them Melanie Klein herself, claim that it can exist on all levels, even in normality.
The next question is whether projective identification always involves aggressively cathected or devalued parts of the self. There is hardly any doubt that Melanie Klein mostly used the expression in this sense, but right from the start, however, she also held the view that good, highly valued parts of the self might be deposited in the object, so that in this way, it could be protected against destructive impulses. In Thomas Ogden's classical paper (1979), an example is referred to where a boy experienced that in his inner world he contained presences (cf. Shafer below) which were at the same time poisonous and life-giving. He relieved himself from these aspects of himself by unloading them onto the therapist. As soon as the therapist gave signals that he had received these parts, the boy seemed relieved, partly because he was free from pressure and partly because he felt that the parts were still alive. The example illustrates that Ogden considered the situation to be complex. Even if he seems to stick to the