Projective Identification: The Fate of a Concept

In this book Elizabeth Spillius and Edna O'Shaughnessy explore the development of the concept of projective identification, which had important antecedents in the work of Freud and others, but was given a specific name and definition by Melanie Klein. They describe Klein's published and unpublished views on the topic, and then consider the way the concept has been variously described, evolved, accepted, rejected and modified by analysts of different schools of thought and in various locations – Britain, Western Europe, North America and Latin America.

The authors believe that this unusually widespread interest in a particular concept and its varied ‘fate’ has occurred not only because of beliefs about its clinical usefulness in the psychoanalytic setting but also because projective identification is a universal aspect of human interaction and communication.

Projective Identification: The Fate of a Concept will appeal to any psychoanalyst or psychotherapist who uses the ideas of transference and counter-transference, as well as to academics wanting further insight into the evolution of this concept as it moves between different cultures and countries.

Elizabeth Spillius studied general psychology at the University of Toronto (1945), social anthropology at the University of Chicago, The London School of Economics and The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (1945-1957) and psychoanalysis at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London (1956 to the present). Her main writings have been Family and Social Network (1957, writing as Elizabeth Bott), Tongan Society at the Time of Captain Cook's Visits (1982), Melanie Klein Today (1988) and Encounters with Melanie Klein (2007)

Edna O'Shaughnessy came to psychoanalysis from philosophy. She trained first as a Child Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s, she trained at the British Psychoanalytical Society, of which she is a training and supervising analyst and also a child analyst. Her many published papers are written from both a clinical and a conceptual perspective