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Chapter Two Part One – Literature review - Page 34
available other. An additional requirement is that there is a valency within the other to
receiving and responding to the projection, in other words that this other is a potential
introjector of this experience. It is crucial that, at some level, the other is involved. The
projector can then relate to and identify with the projected experience within the
introjector (Stadter, 1996).
Projective Identification is different to more straightforward projection, which is open to
reality testing. For example, in projection, someone may remind me a key figure in my
past, such as a parent. However, if this person does not have a valency to introject my
projections, and if my need to project and projectively identify is not overwhelming,
then we can establish relatively easily through what is known as ‘reality testing’ that
this is not the relationship that I might anticipate from my previous experience.
An example of projective identification would be the so-called ‘Helping Profession
Syndrome’ (Malan, 1979). In this case, helping professionals with traumatic pasts,
perhaps involving childhood abuse and neglect or other traumata, are unable to process
and deal with these experiences directly, but instead are drawn compulsively to respond
to and to deal with these experiences in others, for example by choosing, partly
unconsciously, to work with clients who have experienced similar traumata.
Incidentally, avoidance of phenomena of this type is one reason for the requirement for
intending psychotherapists and psychoanalysts to undergo treatment themselves before
qualifying to train or to help others.
Although this example may help understanding of the process of projective
identification, it is relatively negative, focussing on its function as a psychological
defence mechanism. Projective identification is an apparently universal phenomenon,