ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic view of the nature of identification processes has steadily expanded since S. Freud’s original idea about ‘primary identification’ with the object being superseded by the internalisation of the objects in the ego, following the resolution of the Oedipus complex. From as early as The Psychoanalytical Process Donald Meltzer had written of ‘intrusive’ projection, suggesting that ‘projective identification’ was not the right term for Mrs Klein’s original description of a pathological mechanism for entering and controlling another person. Introjection is a complex process which is enabled by projection, in the context of a two-way communicative link between mother and baby, or baby and adult parts of the personality. The concept of adhesive identification was developed by Meltzer in association with Esther Bick’s observations on psychic skin. Adhesive identification is neither projective nor introjective; the Kleinian spatial model brings it to light, since the problem reveals itself through two-dimensionality.
