ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the contemporary Kleinian concept of projective identification as it appears in the literature and presents a major distinction between narcissism and echoism in considering the sequence of introjection and projection. It describes the projective mechanisms that take place, which can be experienced first-hand in the clinical situation through the therapist’s countertransference. The book considers the correspondence of the internal object relations to the patient’s relationships and behaviours in the external world. Transference and countertransference represent the patient’s and the therapist’s unconscious feelings encountered in the clinical situation, respectively. The concepts of projective identification and countertransference relate to one another in relation to their function in mobilising role-related behaviour. R. Britton seems to move beyond a model where the destructive object resides only in the superego and goes on to describe an object that colonises, and has an impact on, the ego.
