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Since the aim of this book is both to bring together my earlier experience and ideas about projective identification, scattered in various publications, and to amend and amplify them with current views, all as a basis for exploring some of the wider social and political implications of this mental mechanism, I thought at first to republish here the earlier statements. But I find, on reviewing, that everything I have written in the past thirty years is shot through with reports of these phenomena. The only option is to take only the major publications in chronological order, abstracting from them the developing ideas.
But as an exception to this I have chosen to republish in full the paper “The Relation of Anal Masturbation to Projective Identification.” It represents first of all a clinical discovery that surprised me, and secondly it is certainly the jumping off place for all subsequent developments in my thought on this subject. As a preamble I might mention that I had been very unhappy about Melanie Klein's paper “On Identification” but knew not why for some years. It seemed clear to me that, regardless of the author of the novel's wish to be ambiguous, there was no need for psycho-analytical ambiguity. Clearly, like Golding's ‘Pincher Martin’, the story of Fabian represents the dream of a dying man. Its events therefore belong squarely in the inner and not the outer world. Only with the writing of this paper in 1966 did I discover the real reason for my dissatisfaction: the tendency of Mrs. Klein's paper to continue treating projective identification as a psychotic mechanism and one which operated with external objects, primarily or exclusively.