Projective identification
Immature defence at the major image-distorting level of the DSM-IV scale; primary in McWilliams' scheme. The person disowns a feeling and then, through subtle pressure in how they treat you, gets you to actually feel it or act it out, while they stay oddly free of it.
What drives it
Gets rid of an unbearable state while keeping control of it in someone else. It is also a primitive form of communication: it makes the other person know from the inside what the speaker can't put into words.
How it shows
Work
You leave a one-to-one feeling incompetent though nothing critical was said; they were the one who couldn't bear feeling incompetent. A calm-looking boss runs a chronically anxious team. You find yourself harsher with one report than with anyone else, and they seem to draw exactly that out of you. The tell is that the feeling is in you, unlike your usual state, and fades when they leave.
Relationships
The partner who says nothing angry but provokes until you explode, then is the calm one: “See, you're the one with the temper.” You end up playing the persecutor, rescuer or abandoner they expected. Therapists use this as data: what you feel with them is often what they can't feel.
Self
Hard to catch from inside, because it feels like the other person's doing. The clue is that people repeatedly react to you with a feeling you never seem to have yourself: anger, helplessness, contempt.
What tells it apart
Projection: Projection stays in the accuser's head and you can stand outside it; projective identification changes how you feel and behave, often against your character.
Countertransference: Countertransference is any reaction you have to the person, including from your own history; the projective-identification part is the reaction that is foreign to you and matches what they are disowning.
Emotional contagion: Contagion transmits a feeling the other person openly shows; projective identification transmits a feeling they visibly lack.
A test
Notice a feeling that arises only with this person and is unlike you, then check whether it is exactly what they can't show; if acting on it would confirm their expectation of you, decline the role and see whether they escalate.
Questions to carry
- Which feeling shows up in others only around this person, and how much does it match what they never show?
- Around whom do I end up feeling something that seems to belong to them?
How strong the research is
clinical. Central in object-relations clinical work and widely used to read countertransference, but almost untested experimentally and defined differently by different writers.
Where it comes from
Melanie Klein, 1946; Wilfred Bion, 1959 and 1962; Thomas Ogden, 1979
On the family tree: Melanie Klein
Sources
- Melanie Klein, Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946)
- Otto F. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975)