ABSTRACT
Otto F. Kemberg has had to deal with the very tricky problem of answering the question of how one puts something outside oneself even before the boundary between self and other, between self and object has been created. Kernberg has given special emphasis to projective identification as a psychotic mechanism, and of course we do at times see the regressive breakdown of boundaries in psychotics. The projective transference would be the weeding out of some content from a self-representation, with that content then being transferred to an object representation. Omnipotent control, idealization, devaluation, projective identification, splitting, denial all have implied interpersonal functions. If one looks at the notion of projective identification within a one-person context, what is being implied is a projection from a self-representation to an object representation within the intrapsychic realm of the individual. The projective transference would be the weeding out of some content from a self-representation, with that content then being transferred to an object representation.
