ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how a particular way of thinking and working with families has evolved in the Adolescent Department of the Tavistock Clinic. Given the ordinariness or ubiquity of the family unit within society it is somewhat surprising that those influenced by psychoanalytic theory have studied the family considerably less than they have studied individuals, or groups of unrelated individuals. Psychoanalysis has immeasurably contributed to the understanding of individual experience, and ideas from psychoanalysis similarly enrich the understanding of the individual relationships in the family and the community. Essentially, projective identification describes a process by which an individual, unconsciously attributes to another a feeling, thought or phantasy whilst disowning its existence in themselves because it is intolerable to the self. Many of the beliefs will be at the level of phantasies about the quality of certain relationships such as the mother-child relationship, or the relationship between the parents, and the view of the outside world.
