ABSTRACT
Psychoanalyst Scharff describes a case in which a patient’s use of projective identification allowed both patient and analyst to experience “profound unconscious communication”. Since the death of Melanie Klein, various scholars have expanded on her original definition, differentiating “normal” from “pathological” aspects of projective identification and elevating it to the status of an ordinary developmental process. Some analysts use a combination of clinical and metaphoric language in their descriptions of projective identification. While it is not unusual for the use of a psychoanalytic term to change over time, in the case of projective identification the changes have been so extensive, and use of the term so widespread and disparate, that the concept has become almost impossible to pin down. Many analysts consider projective identification to be a more primitive process than either projection or identification—a kind of confusion of subject and object, a retrograde blurring of inner boundaries.
