Your feelings or mine? Projective identification in a context of counselling families living with multiple sclerosis

Abstract

Melanie Klein's concept of projective identification is now in common use by counsellors and psychotherapists. Julia Segal describes her own hypothesis about the way it works as well as her use of it in her practice, working as a counsellor for people with multiple sclerosis, members of their families and professionals working with them. When a person cannot bear to feel an emotional state they can evoke the feeling in someone else, not only a therapist or counsellor but also others within the family. Segal describes the way powerful emotions can be evoked in the counsellor; in particular the feeling that a certain idea cannot be shared with a client. She also describes working with clients who are on the receiving end of such projected feelings, sometimes evoked by illness within the family. She also points out that unresolved emotional states suffered in childhood can leave adults unable to bear certain feelings. If the feelings threaten to re-emerge in adulthood, perhaps triggered by their own children reaching a certain age, parents sometimes attempt to rid themselves of the emotional state by projective identification and in the process, evoke a version of the feelings in their own children. This may, for example, exert pressure on parents to divorce just as their own children reach the age they were when they themselves lost a parent.