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When Melanie Klein first described the omnipotent phantasy of projective identification it appeared as an exotic, a rare psychotic phantasy involving external objects and deep alienation of the sense of identity. Forty-five years of research, clinical experience with children and adults and a wide experience of baby observation have not only demonstrated its elementary function with internal objects but have made clear the wide range of phenomena, both useful for relationships and communication or wildly pathological, that come within this broad description of narcissistic identification processes.
Infant observation in particular strongly suggests its essential nature in the preverbal period as the mediator between the baby's confusional states and the mother's capacity for reverie and unconscious dream-thought. A view of the developmental process that emphasizes structure of self and objects in the light of splitting processes must necessarily take into consideration the unevenness of development: that those parts of the self which make contact with external figures are most likely to establish enduring relations with internal objects and benefit from the facilitation, through thought, of learning from experience, that is from emotional experiences. But other parts of the personality do not develop this capacity for intimacy, must learn by other routes and are forced thereby relentlessly towards adaptation rather than development. Of these other parts, relatively estranged or absolutely estranged from the heart of the internal family structure, one or another is perhaps left behind at each developmental step (“step” is more appropriate than “point” because the developmental process, as represented in psychoanalysis, certainly makes leaps of comprehension and acceptance — Wittgenstein's “now I can go on”). Clinical differentiation suggests that parts may be left behind in the womb, producing states of withdrawal quite different in phenomena from those of projective