ABSTRACT
Projective identification is not abstract - it is a direct experience we all have. It refers to interactions with others in which you seem to be captured, kidnapped by their emotions or emotional meanings, and then carried into a kind of “script” in a way that you had not intended. It is a psychological process that includes or consists of any/all of the following: a defense, a mode of communication, a form of relating to another person emotionally, and an opening to psychological change. This chapter offers a brief history of the term “projective identification,” including psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s descriptions of this process: an expelling of unbearable parts of one’s mind into another, while this other “identifies with” the extruded part, often unconsciously. It is a means of keeping painful, dangerous, frightening experiences outside oneself, while holding the acceptable experiences inside oneself - a type of “splitting.” Individuals in a couple inevitably enact this process, attempting to control their own distress, by hoping to control the other person, through projection. We give examples of couples in distress, and using projective identifications, and introduce the ways in which DT orients itself to address these problematic ways of relating.
