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identification, fueled by unconscious envy, serves to destroy – once again in phantasy – the object of envy. As Klein viewed the infant’s project as keeping the bad out and the good in, she noted that projective and introjective identification go hand in hand. She observed that a pathological use of projective identification keeps the subject in an illusory phantasy of being able to avoid the long and painful process of mourning described by Freud (1915) and thus – in the Kleinian framework – impede the move from the paranoid- schizoid position to the depressive position. Klein thought of projective identification as an unconscious phantasy – both the ‘projection’ and the ‘identification’ parts are unconscious. The object or part-object who is the recipient of the projection does not have to be present and does not have to know about the projection at all. Klein stressed the fact that this mode of functioning – splitting / denial / idealization / projective identification – erases the boundary between external reality and psychic reality and allows the subject to gain power – in phantasy – over the whole or part of an external person or of an internal object. The unconscious phantasy of projective identification is a powerful process. It will always have real effects on the mind of the person projecting (who will have lost part of himself and may for example feel very certain and righteous or may feel very empty after a massive projection). And it can under certain circumstances have real effects on the person who is the recipient. Wilfred Bion expanded Klein’s notion of “projective identification as a defensive phantasy” to include its function as a normal, pre-verbal form of communication that actually occurs between mother and infant . He felt that these early communicative experiences were extremely consequential and saw the development of the capacity to think as dependent on how mother and infant are able to adjust to one another. From 1962 on (Bion 1962a, 1962b) he describes how the child’s development of the capacity to think (i.e. alpha function) is dependent on primitive sensorial experience (beta elements) being managed and thus transformed in the mother-child relationship. Bion’s development of the theory of mind was revolutionary in considering that the infant’s capacity to think about and thus manage experience is dependent on the relationship with the alpha function of another human being, i.e., the mother’s. Along the lines of Kantian philosophy, Bion considered that thinking is called into existence to cope with thoughts, that thinking is a development forced upon the psyche by the pressure of experience and not the other way around. Bion believed that, based on the need to survive, the baby has an inbuilt expectation (a pre- conception) of the existence of a satisfying breast and when she/he experiences this satisfaction, both physically and emotionally (a realization) she/he begins to build an as yet unnamed concept (a conception) which becomes the basis for healthy development. As the baby will inevitably experience distress, the capacity to tolerate frustration will facilitate the development of the capacity to ‘think’, which in turn helps the baby to manage the frustration. This process is dependent on the mother’s ability to “contain” the baby’s projections of “pain and anguish” into her. (see entry CONTAINMENT: CONTAINER-CONTAINED) Under the best of circumstances, the personalities of both mother and infant are able to adapt to one another so that the infant, with its rudimentary reality sense, is able to produce behaviors
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