ABSTRACT
The concept of identification has become central to any psychoanalytic understanding of the formation of the self, particularly understandings that grow out of the object relations tradition. Melanie Klein notion of projective identification was conceived as the most primitive infantile defence against an overwhelming and potentially annihilating innate anxiety, which she linked to the death instinct. In The Telescoping of Generations, Haydee Faimberg describes a process of transgenerational projective identification, in which parents project unwanted aspects of themselves into their children, while appropriating for themselves what they feel is loveable about their children. As Ogden describes it, W. R. D. Fairbairn’s conception of maturation depends upon an escape from imprisonment within the internal object world formed in early life: Psychological growth, for Fairbairn, involves a form of acceptance of oneself that can be achieved only in the context of a real relationship with a relatively psychologically mature person.
