ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two concepts that will help people to understand the differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personalities: the first is projective identification and the second is the notion of link and attacks on linking. In Learning from Experience, Wilfred Bion conceptualises the idea as a container–contained relationship, which acquires a different level of generalisation and enables an understanding of the relationship between a realistic and communicative projective identification of the infant. As often happens in psychoanalysis, clinical research also contributed, with the understanding that projective identification could become hypertrophied and excessive in its omnipotence if there were serious flaws in the mother-infant primary relationship. Melanie Klein wrote about excessive projective identification; Bion defined excessive as related to omnipotence. His clinical experience made him understand that the principle of reality coexists with the pleasure principle right from the beginning of life.
