The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 1987/3. [antikvár]

PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION: AN ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESIS BY MICHAEL S. PORDER, M.D. The concept of projective identification as a primitive defense mechanism is reassessed. An alternative hypothesis is offered: that projective identification can best be understood as a compromise formation which includes as its major component an "identification with the aggressor' or a "turning of passive into active." This reversal is demonstrated within a two-tiered transferencelcountertransference structure. On the surface is the familiar transferencel countertransference of the analyst as powerful parent and the patient as the helpless child. On the deeper level the patient enacts the role of dominant parent and the analyst experiences the feelings which the patient had felt as a child. The concept of projective identification has been a vexing problem for psychoanalysts since its originál description by Klein (1946). One has only to ask any group of psychoanalysts or psychiatrists to define the term to realize that it remains very difficult for both clinicians and theoreticians to arrive at an acceptable consensus as to its meaning. Meissner (1980) even recommended that the term be abandoned because of the "mixing or confusion of fantasy and process, of metaphor and mechanism" (p. 65). Despite this drawback, many analysts agree that there is something of great importance to the concept. In this paper I will review somé of the history of the term and will describe somé of the various attempts that have been made to account for the clinical picture it defines. I will alsó present case material in an attempt to understand the clinical phenomena which have been described as projective identification.