Introduction

Together with these harmful excrements, expelled in hatred, split-off parts of the ego are also projected on to the mother, or, as I would rather call it, into the mother. These excrements and bad parts of the self are meant not only to injure but also to control and take possession of the object. Insofar as the mother comes to contain the bad parts of the self she is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self.

The thrust of psycho-analysis has moved relentlessly from a simplistic explanatory hypothesis and an optimistic aim to cure mental illnesses, towards a state of bewildered description of mental phenomena. In its tremulous hope of doing more good than harm, both appelations — schizoid and mechanism — have fallen away from our use of the terms splitting processes and projective identification. First of all neither of them are confined to what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position, and secondly they are of a different level of abstraction in the vocabulary of psycho-analysis. Splitting processes is a way of describing something that must happen to account for the fluctuations in the integration of self and objects. Projective identification, on the other hand, is the name of an omnipotently implemented phantasy affecting the relationships between parts of the self and objects in the external and internal worlds.

This book is an attempt to bring together my clinical experiences of the operation of projective identification as seen in the consulting room, and from this to extrapolate a view of it as a mental phenomenon of significance in the development of the individual and in the evolution of the society that each person both inhabits and in some measure helps to form. It is over forty years since Mrs. Klein's modestly presented paper marked the watershed between her early amplification of Freud and Abraham's model of the mind and the later Kleinian and Post-Kleinian developments. Certai