A CRITICAL-REVIEW OF THE CONCEPT OF PROJE CTIVE IDENTIFICATION AND ITS CLINICAL-APPLICATIONS

The development of the concept of projective identification is present ed and critically reviewed, especially the tendency to broaden the con cept to include every form of interaction, a mixing of process and fan tasy, and the failure to distinguish it from the Freudian concept of p rojection. The processes nowadays often circumscribed as projective id entification can be understood as a combination of ''classical'' defen ce mechanisms with interactional processes. The recent formulations in developmental psychology describe the processes of interpersonal affe ctive exchange, which are mystified by Kleinian terminology. The curre nt practice of seeing every intensive affective reaction of therapists and therapeutic teams as the result of projective identification has alternative explanations. These factors often take effect in clinical practice but are ignored. The concept of projective identification and the container-metaphor as well as a widespread naive concept of count ertransference seem to be unsuitable for understanding parallel proces ses within both the analyst and the patient. Approaches for a transact ional view are presented.