Concept Of Projective Identification Research Articles

Group supervision for prison officers: an orthopedagogical approach to emotional management

ABSTRACTBackground: Prison Officers (POs) are in the front line of managing everyday encounters which can often be emotionally charged. POs ordinarily are not trained with a psychological mindedness to manage these encounters. Objective: The challenge is to develop a model of education and practice (orthopedagogy) that offers a level of psychological mindedness for POs which can in turn yield a safer prison wing milieu. A framework of reflective practice, which provides opportunities for POs to learn and apply the concept of projective identification (PI) is outlined. Data: Drawn from practitioner ethnography, the conduction of supervision groups for PO’s is described and attention is drawn to the dual roles of supervision as education as well as containing pastoral space. Conclusions: The focus on PI as the central tenet of the supervision for POs represents an innovation of education in the prison sector. Implications for practice are considered, both in terms of practice in secure forensic therapeutic communities and Psychologically Informed Planned Environments (PIPEs), as well as case for a more general level of application of psychoeducation across the prison estate, where a working knowledge of projective identification could improve transactions between prisoners and prison staff.

Psychoanalytic Underpinnings of Socially-Shared Normativity.

Alongside social anthropology and discursive psychology, conversation analysis has highlighted numerous ways in which cultural forms of perceiving and acting in the world are primarily rooted in socially shared normativity. However, when consideration turns to the origins and purposes of human affect and emotion, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis appear to face particular difficulties that arise from the over-arching focus on sense-making practices. This article considers the proposal that psychoanalytic thinking might inform our understanding of how socially shared normativity emerges during infancy and early childhood. First, a framework is sketched out that highlights the fact that from the beginning, an infant’s earliest experience is bound up with those procedures, practices, and social actions that make up what conversation analysts call members’ methods. Second, comparisons are drawn between conversation analysis and psychoanalytic accounts of early experience for infants during the first years of life. Discussion then moves to the Kleinian notion of object relations and the concept of projective identification. Essentially, this is a theoretical account of how “what-was-once-one” (the mother-infant unit) somehow differentiates resulting in the gradual emergence of the “individuated being.” What is often glossed over in this account is the discursively embedded nature of projective identification; a process that is itself interdependent with the embodiment that makes up the infant’s lived engagement with the world. Whatever might constitute consciousness emerges from somatic, embodied, material-physical, tactile/affective experience – that is, a fundamentally social milieu. Ultimately, this raises the question of how transformation (i.e., from the social to the individual) occurs. One answer may be Winnicott’s idea of the transitional space, where the “good-enough” parent is said to be somebody, who can “contain” both negative and positive identifications coming from the infant, transform and re-project such identifications, but in modified form. In this way, the infant begins to recognize/experience what it is they are “feeling.” Such projective identifications are conveyed within and through the prevailing discourses that constitute all social practices. Concluding comments note that conversation analysis may find in psychoanalytic thinking a framework for understanding the interdependence between affect and action, given that in psychoanalytic thought, we find a thoroughly relational conception of human nature.

We need to talk about Fabian: Klein’s ‘lost’ theory of projective identification and the social construction of gender/queer objects

Melanie Klein’s seminal concept of projective identification provides an important theoretical mechanism for working through the Oedipus complex. Klein saw it as the key to achieving emotional maturity. As well as the choice of object, which decides our sexual identity, Klein sees a second choice to be made as subject, which shapes our gender. The question is not only ‘what does a woman (or man) want?’, as Freud and Jones argued, but ‘who (and how) does a woman (or man) become?’, as Simone de Beauvoir memorably asked. How is our gender acquired for us and by us? Queer theory asks us to refuse gender normativity. That is one response. But unless we arrive at our own answer to gender, says Klein, the capacities both to love and to be loved will remain elusive.Klein invites us to leave Oedipus behind in Ancient Thebes and move the stage to Paris in 1920, the setting for a novel by Julien Green, If I Were You. Our Modern hero is a young man, Fabian Especel. This article rediscovers Fabian and adds to Klein’s theory of internal objects the role of queer objects as Weberian ‘abject types’, to update the Oedipus complex today.

“They hate me now but where was everyone when I needed them?”: Mass incarceration, projective identification, and social work praxis

Mass incarceration has been thoroughly explored as a racial, social, and economic project. A psychoanalytic lens makes visible another dimension: the ways in which the dehumanization and criminalization of certain members of society forces them to function as repositories for the unbearable aspects of our otherwise shared humanity. In this article, I take a psychodynamic social work perspective and explore how the creation and maintenance of traumatogenic conditions, and the criminalization of the adaptations that people make to them, enables the logic of mass incarceration by taking a problem in the environment—one that implicates the collective—and relocates it inside the individual—as a person to be punished. Applying the concept of projective identification to these social-level dynamics, I argue that mass incarceration serves an important psychological function for society related to anxieties about racial and economic inequality and, as such, we continue to invest in mass incarceration despite its failure. I discuss its implications for social work praxis, emphasizing the need for both meaningful thought and effective action. I take an interdisciplinary approach and rely on psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, and critical race studies in the hope of making clear the pernicious hold that mass incarceration has on the United States, and the work we must do as a collective to wrest ourselves from it.

Identity theft

Psychoanalysis has almost disappeared from the curricula of most American universities, which I illustrate by the case of the department of psychology at my own university, Harvard. Courses on psychoanalysis are very rare there and it is mostly seen as a part of history of psychology and not as a set of ideas that can be useful nowadays. Personality models developed by Freud or Melanie Klein, as well as many more contemporary psychoanalysts, are, however, still very relevant for the humanities. This is particularly the case for Shakespeare studies and I am trying to show that despite the fact that psychoanalysis can enrich this field, less and less students show interest in it or are willing to admit that they themselves may have unconscious reactions. I focus on the usefullness of the concept of projective identification and propose the thesis that is another name for the activities of theater, and indeed for theater itself.

Projective Identification and Image of God

My principal concern in this study is to a explore God-human relationship in the psychology of religion, specifically in the perspective of object relations theory. Freud considers religion as an illusion defined by pathology, and thus, a product of neurosis. However, Winnicott does not see an illusion as negative like Freud’s view, but rather as positive and even as necessary for the self’s sustenance through a life-long experience. Winnicott’s conception of illusion is based on the child’s early experience of separation from its mother. Winnicott finds out, from this separation experience of the child, the notion of a “transitional space,” where the child comes to experience a middle area between illusion and reality. The child experiences this transitional space through “transitional objects, which plays an important role to suggest the relationship between religion and psychology, in terms of the interpersonal experience of the “intermediate area” between God and a human. Meissner and Rizzuto demonstrate the relationship between God and the human, building on Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects and the transitional space of reality and illusion. Now the concept of projective identification may provide an important possibility of psychologically postulating God-human relationship, in that a basic human relatedness to God come from the relationship between human limitation and ultimate Divine being. The image or representation of God as “an ultimate transitional object” can be suggested, according to Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object. Heinz Kohut’s concept of “selfobject” can be used for the analogy of God as a selfobjet in the concept of an ultimate transitional object. In probing God-human relationship in projective identification, intervention of the pastor will be inevitably involved in their projective identification. The pastors’ capacity then for toleration and containment is considered their most important therapeutic resource. The pastor can perceive that s/he plays an instrumental role in the relationship with the parishioners.

Unconscious phantasy as a structural principle and organizer of mental life: The evolution of a concept from Freud to Klein and some of her successors

Starting with Freud's discovery of unconscious phantasy as a means of accessing his patients’ internal world, the author discusses the evolution of the concept in the work of Melanie Klein and some of her successors. Whereas Freud sees phantasy as a wish fulfilling imagination, dominated by primary process functioning and kept apart from reality testing, Klein understands phantasies as a structural function and organizer of mental life. From their very beginnings they involve object relations and gradually evolve from primitive body‐near experiences to images and symbolic representations. With her concept of projective identification in particular, Klein anticipates the communicative function of unconscious phantasies. They are at the basis of processes of symbolization, but may also be put into the service of complex defensive operations. The author traces the further evolution of the concept from the contributions of S. Isaacs, the theories of thinking proposed by W.R. Bion and R. Money‐Kyrle, Hanna Segal's ideas on symbolization and reparation all the way to the latest approaches by R. Britton, J. Steiner and others, including the understanding of transference and counter‐transference as a ‘total situation’. Points of contact with Freud are to be found particularly in connection with his concept of ‘primal phantasies’. In the author's view, the idea of the transmission and communicative potential of unconscious phantasies enabled these authors to overcome the solipsistic origins of drive theory in favour of a notion in which unconscious phantasies both set down the coordinates of the inner world and form and reflect the matrix of inter‐subjective relations.

Hunting Our Bad Selves: Projective Identification and the Case of the West Memphis Three

When studying discursive structures of othering, rhetorical critics often turn to Kenneth Burke and his work on scapegoating as a phenomenon of projection and collective identity formation. In this essay we argue that Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic concept of projective identification offers a necessary extension of Burke’s theory of scapegoating that better addresses the primary unconscious mechanism through which communities define themselves against an enemy other. Through an analysis of the infamous West Memphis Three case and its aftermath, we show how a rhetorical-psychoanalytical approach grounded in Kleinian projective identification offers critics a more thorough understanding of persecutory othering.

Public Anxieties and Projective Identification: Therapeutic Encounters Between Danish Clairvoyants and Their Clients

AbstractThe capacity to receive occult messages and look into the future is claimed by individuals in most societies and probably always has been. In Denmark, clairvoyance is a popular service offered at the alternative market for counseling and healing. During my fieldwork among Danish spiritualist mediums in 2007–08, I was often puzzled by the way in which clairvoyants and clients seemed to share the same kinds of problems. This observation steered my interests toward understanding how personal sensations and feelings are exchanged in therapeutic encounters and raised questions about who is doing what to whom. Drawing on Jung's concept of the wounded healer to highlight the clairvoyant's role as a channel for societal anxieties and Melanie Klein's concept of projective identification as a framework for understanding the defense mechanisms at stake in object relations, I argue that psychoanalysis may add an important critical dimension to the anthropology of therapeutic encounters.

Burial and resurgence of projective identification in French psychoanalysis

Curiously enough, the concept of projective identification was ignored, and even rejected in France for at least two decades after the publication of the founding texts of Melanie Klein and Herbert Rosenfeld. This rejection was due to a critique from child psychoanalysts close to Anna Freud and also from the teaching of Lacan: the first took the real mother–child relation extensively into account, while the latter only saw the internal object as a signifier. The fact that during this period the countertransference was a concept reduced to its negative content no doubt explains this deliberate ignorance. With the dissemination of a broader and more positive conception of the countertransference, a renewal of interest could be observed in the 1980s with references to empathic listening and to the effects of thought‐induction.

Theoretical Paper Projective identification in the analytic relationship: Phantasy, or the symbiotic dance of the Eloi and the Morlock's?

Content & Focus:H.G. Well’s novel The Time Machine shows how art imitates reality and brings to life Klein’s concept of projective identification. Using a composite example of sessions from a Humanistically-oriented addiction service and subsequent psychoanalytic training, supports how the process of projective identification can be understood as a communication. The concept of projective identification is developed from an intrapsychic to an inter-psychic process. In this reciprocal relationship projective identification is the therapy. How the philosophical underpinnings of each service and their competing approaches can lead to very difference outcomes, is also explored.Conclusions:Klein’s theories have multidimensional implications and the concept of projective identification is easily misused. Rather than conceptualising projective identification as a psychotic or malign defense, the emotional tugs of intersubjectivity are a key to effective therapy. Patient and practitioner essentially become co-operating parts of the whole, and so develop together by working thorough the symbiotic dance that is projective identification.

Projective Identification Simplified: Recruiting Your Shadow

One of the many gifts of Anne Alonso was her ability to simplify the practice of psychotherapy for her students so that it was accessible without being “dumbed down.” In that spirit, I hope to simplify the murky concept of projective identification so it is readily useable for therapists, especially, in this article, for group therapists. I describe how I teach the concept, which includes the use of visual aids (cartoons, TV and movie clips, and diagrams), and suggest that we replace it with a construct which is less murky and, as a result, more accessible.

Een bijzondere casus (serie): De volgroeide boom die zichzelf omhakt tot dode stronk

In this article, I describe the treatment of a young woman with borderline symptoms by the combination of art therapy in a group setting and a psychodynamic group psychotherapy with a mentalization focus. Through this case presentation, I want to illustrate two important aspects of her treatment: a the way in which a verbal psychodynamic group psychotherapy is intensified and enriched by a non-verbal group; b the importance of the concept of projective identification for understanding and managing the psychotherapeutic process.

Klein, Bion, and Intersubjectivity: Becoming, Transforming, and Dreaming

Kleinian theory and practice has not typically been associated with an intersubjective approach, and the author argues that a close reading of the Kleinian literature reveals an implicit intersubjectivity. The concept of projective identification, originally intended by Klein (1946/1975d) to refer only to a change in the patient's mind in his or her perception of the analyst, has been greatly expanded to include the actual subjective experiences of the analyst in response to the analysand's projections. This has led to an emphasis on the necessity of the analyst becoming the patient's projected phantasy, a process that has been systematically explored by Bion. His writings underscore the role of a kind of dreaming process that is required on the part of both analyst and analysand to transform mutual unconscious communications. The author also addresses the further development of the Kleinian/Bionian view of intersubjectivity by the River Plate Group in Argentina and Uruguay, beginning in the early 1960s, whose contributions include the notion of a shared unconscious phantasy of the analytic couple. The paper concludes with a clinical discussion of two interlinking dreams—one by the author and the other by a female patient—that illustrate these points.

Paranoia and Psychotic Process: Some Clinical Applications of Projective Identification in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

The concept of projective identification has, since its introduction by Melanie Klein over half a century ago, caused much controversy amongst psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. In this paper the author traces some of the key theoretical developments of the concept since its introduction in 1946, including: normal and pathological projective identification, aspects of symbolisation and projective identification as an intrapsychic mechanism. An extended case report of a patient in weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy is offered in order to expand upon some of the theoretical ideas previously considered. Emphasis is placed on the patient's use of intrapsychic projective mechanisms and the emergence and mutation of such mechanisms in the therapeutic relationship.

The therapeutic value of a combined assessment

This paper looks at the value of combining an individual assessment of a child with a family assessment. It demonstrates how an individual assessment can release a child from the scapegoat role in the family. It also examines what happens when a child shows a different aspect of themselves when seen individually. The concept of projective identification is used to understand the clinical material.

Projective identification: A theoretical investigation of the concept starting from ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’

This paper submits passages from four papers‐‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (Klein); ‘On identification’ (Klein); ‘Analysis of a schizophrenic state with depersonalization’ (Rosenfeld); and ‘Remarks on the relation of male homosexuality to paranoia, paranoid anxiety and narcissism’ (Rosenfeld)‐to a critical reading, enabling the theoretical premises which have produced the current, differing views on projective identification to be traced. These views revolve both around the role assigned to identification in the process and around the meaning of the expression‘to identify oneself with’ which in ‘On identification’ goes from ‘to feel similar to, or identical to the other’ to ‘to take another person as a model’. This legitimizes the inclusion of very different phenomena into the concept of projective identification. The author describes some uses of the term ‘projective identification’ and proposes the hypothesis that the process constitutes a way for managing otherness and the separateness of the object (be it external or internal, real or imaginary) that can compromise its reality to a greater or lesser degree. Covering a large set of phenomena, the author poses the question of whether it is useful to retain the term ‘projective identification’. She proposes an answer in the last part of the paper.

Projective identification: A theoretical investigation of the concept starting from ’Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’

This paper submits passages from four papers‐‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (Klein); ‘On identification’ (Klein); ‘Analysis of a schizophrenic state with depersonalization’ (Rosenfeld); and ‘Remarks on the relation of male homosexuality to paranoia, paranoid anxiety and narcissism’ (Rosenfeld)‐to a critical reading, enabling the theoretical premises which have produced the current, differing views on projective identification to be traced. These views revolve both around the role assigned to identification in the process and around the meaning of the expression‘to identify oneself with’ which in ‘On identification’ goes from ‘to feel similar to, or identical to the other’ to ‘to take another person as a model’. This legitimizes the inclusion of very different phenomena into the concept of projective identification. The author describes some uses of the term ‘projective identification’ and proposes the hypothesis that the process constitutes a way for managing otherness and the separateness of the object (be it external or internal, real or imaginary) that can compromise its reality to a greater or lesser degree. Covering a large set of phenomena, the author poses the question of whether it is useful to retain the term ‘projective identification’. She proposes an answer in the last part of the paper.

Projective Identification and Intersubjectivity

The issue of what might constitute intersubjective relations during infancy and early childhood remains something of a puzzle within and beyond psychology. This paper considers whether the psychoanalytic concept of projective identification might supplement or enrich theoretical efforts in this domain. Following introductory comments on distinctive characteristics of Merleau-Ponty’s commentary on intersubjectivity, attention turns to psychoanalytic assumptions and presuppositions underpinning projective identification. Complementary and contrastive themes are drawn out, specifically those which highlight alternative metaphysical positions taken up within these approaches. Discussion touches on the processes involved in the emergence of projective identification and what implications the concept may have for contemporary theories of intersubjectivity in developmental psychology.

‘Projective transidentification’: An extension of the concept of projective identification

Questions about the concept of projective identifi cation still persist. The author presents the following hypotheses: Klein's traditional view and Bion's extension and revision of it can be thought of as occupying a continuum in reverse. He postulates that Bion's concept of communicative intersubjective projective identifi cation (which the author renames ‘projective transidentifi cation’) is primary and inclusive of Klein's earlier unconscious, omnipotent, intrapsychic mode but includes Bion's ‘realistic’ communicative mode as well. The author hypothesizes, consequently, that intersubjective projective identifi cation constitutes both the operation of an unconscious phantasy of omnipotent intrapsychic projective identifi cation solely within the internal world of the projecting subject‐in addition to two other processes: conscious and/or preconscious modes of sensorimotor induction, which would include signaling and/or evocation or prompting gestures or techniques (mental, physical, verbal, posturing or priming) on the part of the projecting subject; followed by spontaneous empathic simulation in the receptive object of the subject's experience in which the receptive object is already inherently ‘hard‐wired’ to be empathic with the prompting subject.