Like the centrality of denial in the evasion of depressive anxiety, projective identification is the key means for evading the persecutory annihilation anxiety of the paranoid-schizoid position. The process has challenging implications, the greatest being that we may use others as repositories for unwanted experience, and our own selves are not entirely distinct from other’s. Indeed we may exchange elements of our identities with others. But equally challenging is that this exchange process is not just a primitive one at the beginnings of our formation of identity. These are processes that go on all through life that have this form and are collected under the term ‘projective identification’.

What is projective identification?