Friday, March 2, 2012

Nathan Schwartz-Salant on the

Correspondence Between Carl Jung's
'Participation Mystique' and Melanie
Klein's 'Projective Identification'
"In 1946 Melanie Klein published Notes on some schizoid
mechanisms (19), in which she coined the term projective
identification. Klein's paper employed the mother/infant objectrelation and outlined a conception of parts of one person being
put into and identified with another person. In the same year,
1946, Jung published the The psychology of the transference
(13), in which he used the arcane symbolism of alchemy to
explore the same phenomenology as Klein. Klein's paper, as
Donald Meltzer has noted, had an electrifying impact [upon]
the analysts who were closely working with her Meltzer (22, p.
20). Jung's hardly had such an impact. For most Jungians, let
alone analysts of other schools of thought, his alchemical model
often seems too abstract for here and now clinical practice. Yet
inherent in Jung's study of the transference lies an approach to
the phenomenology of projective identification which richly
elaborates the findings of Klein and other psychoanalysts, as
well as deepening our understanding and widening the
possibilities for clinical usage. Jung's work also helps delineate
the limitations of employing the concept of projective
identification.
Klein describes how: "The phantasied onslaughts on the mother
follow two main lines: one is the predominantly oral impulse to
suck dry, bite up, scoop out and rob the mother's body of its
good contents The other line of attack derives from the anal
and urethral impulses and implies expelling dangerous
substances (excrements) out of the self and on to the mother or,
as I would rather call it, into the mother. These excrements and
bad parts of the self are meant not only to injure but also to

control and to take possession of the object. In so far as the

mother comes to contain the bad parts of the self, she is not felt
to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self ... Much
of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed against
the mother. This leads to a particular form of aggression which
establishes the prototype of an aggressive object-relation. I
suggest for this process the term projective identification "
(KLEIN 19, p. 8).
Klein further described how both good and bad parts of the self
can be projected. When this is excessive, she says, the ego
becomes weakened and impoverished (Ibid. p. 9), cannot
assimilate internal objects, and feels ruled by them (Ibid. p. 11).
In a further elaboration of these principles, James Grotstein has
emphasised that projective identification is imagination
(GROTSTEIN 10, p. 124). Projective identification, he writes, is
a mental mechanism whereby the self experiences the
unconscious phantasy of translocating itself, or aspects of itself,
into an object for exploratory or defensive purposes (Ibid. p.
123).
Rosemary Gordon has observed that Jung's usage of the term
unconscious identity, psychic infection, participation mystique,
induction, and the process he called feeling-into are synonyms
for projective identification (9, p. 128). Jung's definition of
feeling-into highlights its imaginal nature. It is a kind of
perception process it conveys, through the agency of feeling,
an essential psychic content into the object; whereby the object
is introjected. This content, by virtue of its intimate relation
with the subject, assimilates the object to the subject, and so
links it up with the subject that the latter senses himself in the
object. The subject does not feel himself into the object, but the
object felt into appears rather as though it were animated and
expressing itself of its own accord. This peculiarity depends
upon the fact that the projection transfers an unconscious
content into the object, whence also the feeling-into process is
termed transference in analytical psychology (JUNG, 11, p. 290,
in the translation by H. G. Baynes (1923), pp. 359-60).

Jung's statement refers to positive aspects of projective

identification which lead to aesthetic awareness (JUNG 11, par.
486), empathy, and a deep imaginal searching out of processes
in the object. When he says, The subject does not feel himself
into the object, he refers to a subject who already has an egoself differentiation. But in other instances of projective
identification the subject, or at least certain ego functions of the
subject, as Klein emphasised, do project into the object, and this
can lead to a state of confusion and to a weakening of
consciousness that allows for emotional flooding by
unconscious processes. In extreme instances a relationship
dominated by projective identification can trigger psychotic
episodes. As a result of the way the image of the self can hide in
objects through projective identification, the subject has the
unconscious phantasy of being invisible (GROTSTEIN 10, p.
130). This can become extreme, leading to a sense of a loss of
soul and a terror that the self can never be found.
Negative aspects of projective identification, such as confusion,
identity loss or panic often appear dominant. However,
projective identification also has the power, as Gordon has
explained, to break down inner psychic boundaries, as well as
those between a person and the object world (9, p. 145). This
breakdown of structures is essential to any qualitative
personality change.
Jung often stressed negative features of what Klein called
projective identification. His goal in therapy, as stated in his
commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower, is the
dissolution of those fusion states between subject and object,
states he called participation mystique (JUNG 18, pars. 65-66).
But this goal then appears questionable when Jung himself
explains that once the self becomes the centre of personality,
participation mystique is done away with and results in a
personality that suffers only in the lower storeys, as it were, but
in its upper storey is singularly detached from painful as well
as from joyful happenings (Ibid., par. 67). It would appear

from this statement that one cannot totally do away with the
process of projective identification except to banish it to the
body, hardly a desirable state, and one that can lead only to
mind-body splitting.
In these remarks Jung was centring upon what he called the
compulsion and impossible responsibility (Ibid., par. 78) that
can accompany interactions dominated by participation
mystique. Thus he emphasised the role of the self in breaking
the compulsive tie between subject and object, the negative form
of projective identification. In his study of the Visions of
Zosimos Jung struck a different tone and regarded
participation mystique as underlying alchemical projections
which are a special instance of the mode of thinking typified by
the idea of the microcosm (JUNG 16, par. 123). Generally, Jung
was aware of the potentially creative and destructive aspects of
participation mystique, and thus of the phenomenology of
projective identification. He was influenced by both possibilities
in his analysis of the alchemical imagery of the Rosarium
Philosophorum, his Ariadne thread through the complexities of
the transference (JUNG 13, par. 401)....
The psychology of the transference, Jung's main statement on
the transference, is centrally concerned with the
phenomenology of projective identification. There he addressed
unconscious processes that have an inductive effect on the
unconscious of [the] doctor (Ibid., par. 363). This theme repeats
itself in variations throughout his study (Ibid., pars. 364, 365,
367). Jung described the phenomenology of projective
identification as activating the unconscious and the archetypal
transference..." (pp. 39-42)
Nathan Schwartz-Salant (1988). Archetypal Foundations of
Projective Identification. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol.
33, pp. 39-64