ABSTRACT
Projective identification represents the dangerous side of analytic work for the analyst, exposing him to a professional risk. The object of an experience of intense projective identification by the patient, he may develop a compulsory counter transference reaction. The importance of the analyst's personal analysis and the need to carry out analysis in a proper relational context—that is, in the analytic setting, which naturally includes the "analyst's psychoanalytic mind". The patient is not the analyst's only interlocutor, and the analyst always has to keep in contact with psychoanalysis as an object in his own internal world (italics added, p. 195). It is possible to carry out a psychoanalytic exercise on a fairy-tale since unconscious and primary psychological events and vicissitudes are represented in it—all the more so when the fairy-tale appears as an association during a session. Psychopathological behaviour was produced by identification with the psychotic or psychopathic parent.
