ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the different levels of projective identification that surface with patients in the course of their psychoanalytic treatment and how these dynamics colour the emergence or continuation of analytic contact. There are other patients who dig in with one pervasive form of projective identification as a fortification and retaliation against growth and change. The differences in these levels or forms of projective identification have to do with how intolerable the patient feels about certain aspects of their inner world and their self-object phantasies. Projective identification is often at the core of the transference and must be consistently interpreted and worked with if the analyst’s acting out is to decrease, if analytic contact is to be preserved, and if the patient’s acceptance of self is to increase. The interpretation focuses on the underlying object relational phantasy in the patient’s mind, including the dynamics of the transference.
