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IV. SOCIAL/CULTURAL/POLITICAL APPLICATIONS OF PROJECTIVE- IDENTIFICATORY PROCESSES
The concept of projective identification has been utilized by some psychoanalytic writers to help comprehend phenomena such as abuse, malignant prejudice and genocide. Vamik Volkan (1988) has written extensively on the question of why people commit murder in the name of shared ethnic, national, religious or ideological sentiments. Following Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). Volkan (Varvin and Volkan, 2003; Volkan, 2014a, Volkan, 2014b) focused on large group psychology and the ways such groups deal with shame through disavowal and the fostering of identify through externalization and projection. He coined the term “depositing” to help explain how hatred is passed along the generations as traumatized adults, due to experiences such as war or genocides which threaten large group identities, depositing traumatized self-images into the developing psyches of their children. Grotstein (2004), writing from a Bionian perspective, notes the rampant use of projective identification that colonialists employed to subjugate indigenous peoples based on an alleged moral imperative to purify the heathens. Kernberg (2003a,b) attempts to come to grips with massive social violence by describing a large group’s need to identify with and follow a charismatic leader to meet their ego ideal and adopt a paranoid ideological rigidity. An “other” thus becomes dehumanized and becomes the repository of all projected “badness”, not only justifying horrific violence, but at times raising it to the level of a moral imperative. Susan Grand’s The Reproduction of Evil (2000) utilizes a contemporary relational perspective to understand the nature of evil on an interpersonal level as it functions in the form of a relationship between perpetrator and victim. She describes the process by which the “soul murder” of a victim generates the formation of an unbearable “no self”, which can only be eradicated through a transformation into a perpetrator who has evacuated this dehumanized aspect into his victim. Grand explains that the “othering” that the creation of a sacrificial human life requires involves the formation of an “I-it” relationship (Buber, 1937) whereby the oppressed loses its humanity becoming a thing. This thing-victim then must be destroyed, as it has become the repository for the perpetrator’s “dread”. Thus, Grand is able to vividly explicate how evil is created and reproduced across the generations and helps us comprehend how people come to hate and destroy one another.
V. CONCLUSIONS
Melanie Klein’s introduction of the concept of projective identification in 1946 has had a great impact on psychoanalytic theoretical and clinical thinking worldwide. She developed this concept from her psychoanalytic experiences with children and adults. It has its roots in Freud’s concepts of projection and identification. Klein viewed projective identification as an
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