Abstract

Among psychological ideas, the concept of projective identification is particularly confused, even within the psychoanalytic thought that gave birth to it. Clinical theorists variously assert their wholesale acceptance, complete rejection, and unique qualifications of projective identification as a concept. By contrast, most clinicians agree that the term refers to an actual clinical phenomenon. ;This study explores the relational phenomenon and problematic concept of projective identification with the goal of moving toward a more intelligible understanding that does not suffer from the strict divisions of dichotomous "object relations" theorizing. After surveying the dichotomous roots of projective identification in the work of Klein, Bion, and Grotstein, the work of Ogden is used for its clinical examples and its clarifying focus on projective identification as a "cycle" that manifests an "interplay" of intrapsychic and interpersonal spheres. ;With Merleau-Ponty's existential ideas of "transitivity," the exchange of "conducts," and embodied "being-in-the-world," Ogden's "interplay" is reinterpreted. In this context, projective identification becomes conceivable for the first time as a human phenomenon rather than as an abstract interaction of strictly divided internal and external psychological elements. But Merleau-Ponty's own use of the term "project" is also problematic and relevant to the particular phenomenon of projective identification: how can we be understood existentially to project ourselves into a world to which we already belong? With respect to perception, motility, space, time, and emotion, Merleau-Ponty's struggle to overcome the "self-positing" of the body-subject is explored. ;After using one of Ogden's case examples to concretize our general comparison of object-relations and existential interpretations of projective identification, we find ourselves suspicious of the latter's "projective" aspects. Instead, we find a need to reflect on it as an intertwining of "identificatory" ties whose connections are not total fusions and whose differentations are not absolute fissions. We proceed to introduce Merleau-Ponty's Flesh ontology using Cataldi's theory of emotions, and go on to make six points about projective identification as a nondichotomous and "chiasmic" phenomenon. These points include the suggestion that so-called "projective identification" is a unique folding of Flesh that pertains to the advent of sentient being and the capacity for e-motional experiencing