Projective Identification

Projective identification is a concept introduced by Melanie Klein in 1946 to describe what happens when a person splits off a part of themselves — a feeling, an impulse, a quality — and in unconscious phantasy pushes it into another person, experiencing it as now belonging to that other person rather than to themselves. The mechanism runs deeper than ordinary projection, where a person simply denies owning a feeling and attributes it to someone else. In projective identification, the split-off part takes up a kind of residency in the other person: the self experiences the other as containing it, and then relates to the other as though the other person were that split-off part. Klein introduced the term to explain the infant’s most primitive dealings with its own destructive impulses. It became one of the most productive — and most contested — concepts in the post-Kleinian tradition, eventually absorbed into mainstream clinical thinking as a framework for understanding the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship.

Origins and Definition

Klein coined the term in “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” the same 1946 paper that introduced the paranoid-schizoid position. The coinage arose from her effort to describe the infant’s omnipotent phantasy of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them into the mother.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) Klein’s formulation was precise: “Much of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed towards the mother. This leads to a particular form of identification which establishes the prototype of an aggressive object-relation. I suggest for these processes the term ‘projective identification’.”(Klein, Melanie, 1946)

The term joins two pre-existing concepts. Projection — the attribution of one’s own feelings to others — was already a standard part of Freudian psychoanalytic vocabulary. Identification — the process of becoming like, or taking on the qualities of, another person — had a different valence, referring typically to an internalization rather than an externalization. Projective identification brings these together: the subject identifies with the object by first projecting parts of the self into it, and then relating to the object as though those parts are now properly located there.

Klein’s account rests on the theoretical background of unconscious phantasy. Susan Isaacs, whose formulation Klein endorsed, had defined phantasy as the mental corollary of every instinct — not conscious daydream but the immediate psychic form of every impulse from the first moments of life.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) Projective identification is an activity of unconscious phantasy: the infant does not consciously decide to project its aggression; the projection occurs at the level of primitive mental functioning, shaping how the mother is experienced without any deliberate act.

Key Features

The Mechanism

The basic movement of projective identification is from inside to outside: the self contains something (a feeling, an impulse, a part of itself experienced as bad or unbearable) and, in unconscious phantasy, expels it into an external object.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) The expulsion relies on the ego’s projective capacity, which operates from birth alongside introjection.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) Once the projection has taken place, the object is experienced as now containing the projected part.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) The object is then felt to be a threat — not because it independently threatens, but because it has been loaded with the subject’s own hostility.(Klein, Melanie, 1946)

This is the sense in which projective identification is more than simple denial. The subject does not merely deny owning the destructive impulse; the object is actively distorted by the projection, and the resulting fear of persecution comes back from outside — from what was, at bottom, an internal source.(Klein, Melanie, 1946)

What Is Projected

Klein was specific that both bad and good parts of the self can be projected.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) The most clinically prominent form involves the projection of aggression and destructiveness — bad parts of the self expelled into an object that is then feared as persecutory. But in the projection of good parts, the subject lodges what it values most in an external person or object for safekeeping. This can be loving, as when one’s best qualities are attributed to another in admiration, but it also carries risk: the person loses access to those qualities in themselves and may feel impoverished or dependent on the object that is now felt to carry them.(Klein, Melanie, 1946)

The Resulting Object Relation

Projective identification is the dominant mode of relating in the paranoid-schizoid position.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) It establishes the prototype of an aggressive object relation, as Klein’s original formulation stated: one relates to the object not as it is in itself but as a container of one’s own expelled contents.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) The introjection of the good breast, by contrast, establishes the prototype of a loving relation in which something genuinely good from outside is taken in and becomes a stable internal foundation.(Klein, Melanie, 1946)

In regression from the depressive to the paranoid-schizoid position, projective identification resumes as the primary mode of managing anxiety.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) This means that in adult life, under conditions of sufficient stress, the same dynamics can organize experience — not as a pathological deviation from normal functioning, but as a return to an earlier defensive organization.

Pathological Excess

When projective identification is excessive, it creates a specific danger: the loss of the self’s own coherence.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) Klein illustrated this with a reading of Julian Green’s 1947 novel If I Were You, in which the hero Fabian, driven by envy and self-hatred, enters successive people’s bodies by magical pact.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) Each time Fabian inhabits a new body, he loses more of his own self. The name — the last remaining marker of his identity — is the final thing to go.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) Klein used this dramatization as a clinical metaphor for what happens when projective identification is the dominant mode and the ego disperses itself across objects rather than maintaining its own coherence.(Klein, Melanie, 1946)

The fear associated with this dispersal is profound: it is experienced as a form of death — the death of the self through its own evacuation.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) The anxiety of losing one’s identity through excessive projective identification is thus one of the deepest anxieties Klein identified, related to the terror of ego disintegration that also underlies psychotic states.(Klein, Melanie, 1946)

Projective Identification and Empathy

Klein also identified a normal, non-pathological form of projective identification.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) Empathy — the capacity to understand what another person is feeling — depends on the ability to project good parts of the self into another and thereby identify with their experience.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) This benign projective process underlies the ordinary human capacity for identification with others and is the mechanism behind the everyday feeling “I know what you mean” or “I would feel the same way.” The difference between pathological and normal projective identification lies in degree and reversibility: in the normal case, the projected parts can be retrieved; the self does not become trapped in or confused with the object.

The Internal Economy

The stability of projective identification depends partly on the internal economic situation. When the good breast has been securely internalized, the ego experiences a sense of abundance and can project good parts of itself into the world without depletion.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) The subject can give without feeling impoverished, and can re-introject what has been given out, so that projection and introjection form a balanced cycle.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) When the good internal object is absent or precarious — because excessive envy has attacked and spoiled it — the projective process becomes more desperate and less reversible.

The internalization of a good object and the capacity for projective identification thus stand in a reciprocal relation. Klein noted that the breast taken in with hatred becomes the prototype of the bad internal object and drives the ego to further splitting.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) Repeated cycles of hostile introjection reinforce paranoid-schizoid functioning, while secure internalization of a good breast allows for a more benign projective process.

Clinical Significance

Projective Identification in the Consulting Room

Klein’s own clinical use of the concept was primarily genetic: projective identification explained why the infant came to fear the mother as persecutory. The concept’s transformation into a framework for understanding what happens between analyst and patient in real time was largely the work of the post-Kleinian generation, particularly Paula Heimann and Herbert Rosenfeld.

Heimann’s 1950 paper “On Counter-Transference” — which Klein disapproved of — argued that the analyst’s emotional reactions in the consulting room are not merely personal noise to be managed and set aside but a primary source of information about the patient’s unconscious. The patient’s projective identifications, in this reading, land in the analyst and produce feelings in the analyst that originate in the patient. The analyst who can tolerate and think about these feelings rather than simply acting on them is receiving important clinical data.

This development turned projective identification from a description of infantile phantasy into a two-person process: something the patient does that lands in the analyst and has real effects there. Wilfred Bion carried this further in his model of container and contained, arguing that the infant’s projective identifications are the vehicle by which unbearable proto-mental experiences are communicated to the mother, who metabolizes them and returns them in more tolerable form.

The Negative Transference

The paranoid-schizoid dynamics organized around projective identification are most visible in the negative transference — the patient’s hostility, fear, and denigration directed at the analyst.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) Klein argued that unless these are analyzed directly rather than managed or sidestepped, the analysis cannot reach the earliest layers of the personality. The analyst experienced as persecutory is, in this framework, carrying projected destructiveness; the work of analysis involves interpreting this projection back to the patient in a way that allows its gradual reintegration.

The Schreber Case

Klein briefly applied the framework to Freud’s analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber — the German judge whose memoir of psychotic breakdown Freud analyzed in 1911. In Klein’s reading, Schreber’s delusional system illustrates pathological projective identification at work: his persecutory figures (Flechsig, God) are containers for his own split-off paranoid anxieties and projected destructiveness.(Klein, Melanie, 1946) The persecutory nature of these figures derives from the projected content rather than from any actual quality of the persons involved. This connection to psychosis was important: projective identification was, for Klein, not merely a feature of infantile development but a mechanism active in pathological adult states, particularly schizophrenia and paranoia.

Influence and Legacy

Projective identification became one of the most debated and elaborated concepts in post-Kleinian analysis. The major expansions came from three directions.

Wilfred Bion extended the concept beyond defence into a theory of communication: the infant uses projective identification to communicate states it cannot yet process mentally. The mother’s capacity to receive, tolerate, and modify these projections — what Bion called her reverie — is the model for the analytic function. Bion also introduced the distinction between normal and pathological projective identification on the basis of whether the projected parts can be received and returned, or whether they are evacuated with such violence that communication becomes impossible.

Herbert Rosenfeld used projective identification to develop a systematic psychoanalytic understanding of schizophrenia and narcissistic personality organization. He extended Klein’s reading of the Schreber case into detailed clinical accounts of how psychotic patients use massive projective identification to evacuate psychic contents into the analyst or the world.

The concept was also absorbed — sometimes in substantially modified form — into intersubjective and relational psychoanalysis in North America. In these frameworks, projective identification was separated from its Kleinian metapsychological base (the death instinct, omnipotent phantasy) and reframed as an intersubjective process involving real inductions of feeling in the other person. The debate over whether projective identification is a one-person intrapsychic process (something that happens in phantasy only) or a two-person interactive process (something that actually shapes the other person’s states) has been a major theoretical fault line in clinical psychoanalysis since the 1970s.

See Also

• Paranoid-Schizoid Position
• Depressive Position
• Melanie Klein
• Object Relations Theory
• Splitting
• Transference
• Wilfred Bion
• Herbert Rosenfeld
• Paula Heimann

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Klein, M. (1946–1960). Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. London: Hogarth Press / The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. III. [Source ID: klein-envygratitude-1946]