ABSTRACT
Projective identification often plays a significant role in their intra-psychic and interpersonal interactions. Due to the intensity of some patients' projective efforts, these counter-transference moments of imbalance include periods of deep immersion within the patient's emotional struggles with love, hate, and knowledge in which desire, aggression, and learning are part of complicated internal battles. In these clinical situations, the analyst is pulled into various enactments and often becomes caught up in a number of specific counter-transference patterns that parallel the patient's unconscious world. When the patient's projective identifications shape and color our counter-transference, we enter into close contact with the patient's core unconscious phantasy life. The paranoid-schizoid position is a more immature, primitive state of mind which Melanie Klein encountered in her patients, a state in which objects and the self are experienced in one-dimensional, black-and-white tones that involve splitting and more rudimentary psychic functioning.
