How Projective Identification Works

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Psychological defenses are usually understood as internal walls, mechanisms designed to protect a single isolated mind from its own anxiety. But a specific defense mechanism exists that crosses the boundary of the skull. It actively possesses and controls the behavior of a completely separate person. Clinicians call this specific process projective identification. It operates inside an intersubjective field, a shared psychological space where the unconscious material of one individual is caught and lived out by another. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klene first formalized this concept in 1946 while observing the primal preverbal interactions between mothers and infants.