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intrapsychic means by which the infant relieves itself of unwanted affects, objects and parts of the self, and a mechanism by which it takes control of the mother in [unconscious] phantasy by projecting these aspects into the mother. 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. Klein stressed the fact that this mode of functioning erases the boundary between external reality and psychic reality and allows the subject to gain power – in phantasy – over whole or part of an external person or of an internal object. She viewed projective identification as one of the primal sets of defenses together with splitting , denial and idealization , with which it goes 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. 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 . According to Bion, projective identification is the infant’s primal mode of communication with the mother. The infant projects unwanted, unthinkable, sometimes horrifying experiences (beta-elements) into the mother, who receives and “contain” them and through her alpha-function – where “reverie” is an important factor – transforms the beta-elements into alfa-elements which, when re-introjected by the infant, can be used for the building of primitive thoughts. Thus, projective identification is the basis for the infant’s development of a capacity for thinking. The fundamental theories of Klein and Bion on projective identification have been developed and elaborated in all the three IPA regions. In Europe, especially in England, several analysts have deepened the understanding of projective identification. In the field of infant observation and in the clinical treatment of autistic children, a stage prior to projective identification (adhesive identification) has been described, and in adults light has been shed on how the splitting and projective processes of projective identification lead to paranoid anxieties, where the self feels persecuted by the aggressive and hateful aspects that have been projected into external objects. The clinical usefulness of the concept of projective identification is illustrated by several authors, making it possible for the analyst to catch and understand how the sometimes subtle pressure from these processes influences the transference and countertransference. Donald Meltzer can be considered as the European analyst who has contributed most to the understanding and development of Klein’s and Bion’s theories on projective identification. In North America , Melanie Klein’s theories were first received with resistance, especially because of her emphasis on destructiveness and envy. However, in 1968, Bion moved from London to Los Angeles and stayed there for almost 10 years, working as an analyst and giving seminars. His theories, not least on the communicative aspects of projective identification, gradually had a strong impact on North American psychoanalysis. Many analysts
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