ABSTRACT
Klein developed the idea of projective identification in 1946 in the course of describing the paranoid-schizoid position in her paper 'Notes on some schizoid mechanisms', although she did not put in the crucial definitory sentence, 'I suggest for these processes the term "projective identification"' until the 1952 version of the paper published in Developments in Psycho-Analysis (M. Klein 1952a). Klein had been talking for a long time about the child having phantasies of getting inside the mother's body, but in 'Notes on some schizoid mechanisms' she gave the familiar idea a different emphasis by relating it to projection. She thought of projective identification as a phantasy in which bad parts of the seif were split off from the rest of the self and, together with bad excrements, were projected into the mother or her breast to control and take possession of her in such a fashion that she was felt to become the bad self. Good parts of the self were projected too, she thought, leading to the enhancement of the ego and of good object relations, providing the process was not carried to excess.
