Projective Identification (2016 Rerun)

[Rerun] Dr. Kirk Honda replies to a patron email about projective identification.

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July 22, 2016

The Psychology In Seattle Podcast ®

Trigger Warning: This episode may include topics such as assault, trauma, and discrimination. If necessary, listeners are encouraged to refrain from listening and care for their safety and well-being.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, deserving listeners. If you haven't already, please become a
patron of the podcast by going to patreon dot com.
And today I thought I would just respond to your emails,
particularly the Patreon emails. Another reason to become patron. Okay,
patron Cody emailed in this is a few months ago,

(00:20):
and patron Cody says, I am a child and adolescent
psychiatrist in New Orleans and I'm also a patron of
the podcast. I'm working on a paper on projective identification,
and I have a question. You mentioned that there are
three ways in which it can be brought about, one

(00:40):
by choosing people who have those qualities, two by choosing
someone susceptible to the identification, and three by making someone
identify this way. I was wondering if you had a
reference source for this that I could review. Well, Patron Cody,
I realize it's probably four months since you emailed me this,

(01:03):
and if you're still working on this paper, then you
are very similar to me, because when I go down
a rabbit hole, I spend years writing some papers. I
just recently finished a paper on supervision, and I thought
I was just going to spend I don't know a
couple of days and I ended up spending two months.

(01:24):
I spent probably I don't know, just let's take a
conservative guess of about thirty to forty hours per week
for two months. I spent just so much time, and
it was actually really enjoyable because I'd never really done
a systematic review of supervision. And I'm going to actually
make a podcast or a patron only episode, premium episode

(01:46):
about supervision for everybody. It'll pertain to a lot of
people because it's not just about me as a supervisor,
but also about what it's like to be a supervisor,
and the prevalence of just inadequate times harmful supervision out
there is just appalling, and I have a lot of
research on that. But anyway, so if anything like me,

(02:07):
Patron Cody, you're still working on this paper four months later,
and to some extent I kind of hope that you
still are, because I'm just now getting to this, but
for your sake, I hope you've completed this long ago.
But anyway, a good resource is called It's a book
by Ogden. Ogden is my favorite writer when it comes
to projective identification because he lays it out very understandably,

(02:32):
but thoroughly. And the book is called Projective Identification and
Psychotherapeutic Technique, So not only projective ident the whole book
is about projective identification. And he also goes over how
it's used in therapy for the benefit of the client.
And it is highly compelling and just incidentally, I consider

(02:54):
projective identification, similar to Ogden, as this central feature in
human relations and in therapeutic interactions. For some, projective identification
is but a small factor or piece of the pie
when it comes to human interactions. But I actually, in

(03:16):
the expanded definition, it is something that's happening all the time,
and when you become aware of it, and you become
aware of the patterns, it actually is a powerful way
of looking at the world. So yeah, Ogden book called
Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique. It's probably pretty cheap on
Amazon right now. I bet you can get it for

(03:37):
just a few bucks, honestly. But you refer to you
that there were three ways that projective identification can be
brought about. I've actually expanded that to six different ways,
or several different ways, I should say. But there's a
lot of things I can say about it. But basically

(04:00):
I and others like Ogden believe that we through our
childhoods we will internalize. There's different words for it, some
people who use internalization or interjection, or there's other words.
But I don't like all those silly words, because it's
the spirit behind the word really that's important, not the

(04:20):
word itself. And I think internalization sums it up for
me anyway. And so as we're children, we internalize the
relationships we have with other people. And by internalizing these relationships,
we internalize other people too. So for instance, when our
parents love us and take care of us, we internalize

(04:41):
that relationship of one person loving us and ourselves being loved.
So it's strange that we internalize ourselves. But if you
work with me on this, it actually ends up working
in the end. So we internalize that relationship, and then
these relationships become basically templates in our psyche that become

(05:04):
a part of our personality. They inform who we are,
they inform our expectations, and they also inform our our complexes,
if you will. For instance, when we are criticized, when
we're overly criticized by someone, say your father is over
the critical of you, and will frequently jump you know,

(05:26):
jump down your throat for something you're doing wrong or something. Well,
if that repeats over and over again, that becomes internalized.
That relationship of critical other and criticized self, and the
way that that feels, and the and the particular qualities
of that become particular to your internalization. For instance, if

(05:46):
your father is drinking, then alcohol colors that that interject
or that internalization, or that represent internal representation. Or if
you are scared, that colors that internalization. And so each
person's everyone has a criticized and you know, a critical

(06:10):
internalization because we've all been criticized by our parents. But
for some people it becomes stronger than others, and for
some people and for everyone it always takes on the
particular quality of their unique experiences. So so that's just
something to take note of. Then as we grow older,

(06:31):
this internalization manifests in a number of ways, including a
self voice. This you know, a self critical voice of
like you know, you do something, you go to a
party and you you know, talk with other people and
then on the way home, you just beat yourself up
for every stupid thing you said. Well, that in all
likelihood is because someone beats you up verbally criticizing you

(06:54):
as a child, and that became internalized, and that personality
trait is now a part of you yourself, and you
tend to beat yourself up. You also will tend to
criticize other people. You will tend to reenact this relationship
by embodying the quality of the internalized other and projecting

(07:15):
onto other people the perception of the self. So in
the original interaction, you were criticized, you felt criticized, and
you internalized this experience, and then later on you might
recreate it by criticizing another person and making another person
feel the same way you did when you were a child.
This is a very common thing, particularly in therapy, and
when therapists become aware of it, it is very illuminating

(07:39):
and can be very helpful in assessment and in treatment
because then it leads to understanding what sort of corrective
experiences needed to help people heal and internalize a different experience.
So there are a number of different ways that people
will manifest So again self criticism, you tend to criticize

(07:59):
other people, and you also, through projective identification, need to
find other people that will agree with your projections because
you need to get rid of them. You need to
the whole reason why we do this action. There's a
number of different reasons why we do it. We do
it because we want to reenact things because it just

(08:20):
feels good, because it's comfortable. We also reenact them because
we're trying to work it out, and we also reenact
them because we're trying to project things out of us,
because we're we have this fantasy that if we recreate
it externally, it doesn't it doesn't exist internally because left
to our own devices, we're just we're just sitting alone
at home, criticizing ourselves and feeling terrible. But if we

(08:42):
can criticize someone else, or if we can find someone
else to criticize us, then it makes that internal conflict
external and it gives this fantasy that it no longer
exists inside of us, and it exists outside of us,
which feels better to the ego because it's not us,
it's them. Right. The only reason why I'm criticizing that
idiot is because that person's an idiot or the only person.

(09:03):
The only reason why I am in a world of
you know, someone criticizing me is because that asshole is
a very critical person and it has nothing to do
with me. But in reality, you have internalized, quite naturally
from your childhood environment, a critical other, and the critical
person is you, and no one wants to admit that.

(09:26):
And there's, you know, obviously, reasons why we would try
to defend against that. So just to review a list
of reasons that I've developed over the years as to
why the self why we use projective identification is one

(09:48):
part of the self is threatening to destroy the self
from within. So when you have these worrying factions of
critical other and critic sized self, when you have these
things going on inside of you, they are creating internal strife.
And we will project one side of that conflict into

(10:12):
someone else, and again in that we save ourselves from
the internal conflict. Number two, there is an ongoing conflict
between two orring parts of the self. It's related to
number number one. Number three, there is a distasteful or
shameful part of the self. I mentioned that earlier that
if you have a critical in the A'm focusing on critical,

(10:35):
but it could be a rejecting other that you've internalized.
It could be an abusive other you've you've internalized. It
could be an irresponsible other, It could be a I
don't know, flaky other. There's all sorts of different things
that people angry other, a sad, oppressed other, a pathetic other.

(10:55):
There's all sorts of things that we will internalize when
we're children and then and then proceed to become to
some extent ourselves and then also tend to have a
conflict around it internally and prejecting it. So if we
don't like the other that we've internalized, that has to
become a part of us. The critical other that we've internalized,

(11:16):
the abandoning, projecting other that we've internalized, the pathetic other
that we've internalized. This is a shameful part of this self,
and through projective identification we get rid of it. And
again we don't actually get rid of It's just a fantasy.
It's just a defense. It's a delusion, it's denial. It's
not actually getting rid of it, but it feels good
to do so, in the same way that displacement feels good,

(11:40):
or compartmentalization or minimization. The defenses feel good to us,
they don't actually help us. Usually there are functional defense
mechanisms which I've gone over before, but anyway, Number four,
there is a cultural, cultural or social pressure to not
have that part of the self. This is often not discussed,
but when we interact with culture and society, we become

(12:05):
a part of a system. And this is affecting to us.
And for instance, if you have a Republican in other
that you've internalized and being having a Republican identity that
interacts with society in different ways. And I'm not going

(12:27):
to go into full details on that, but anyway, that's
number four. Number five. Parts of this self are poorly integrated.
So the idea sometimes is through self work or therapy work,
is to integrate these parts of the self. So you
have one part that is critical, and you have another
part that feels criticized and feels humiliated, or feels inadequate,

(12:49):
or it feels incompetent or something. And so you have
these two parts of the self. Both parts are not
very healthy to let linger too long, and both parts
will manifest and dysfunctional ways. You'll either find dysfunctional people
to criticize, or you'll tend to find very critical people
and then proceed to be dysfunctional so that they can

(13:09):
criticize you. And one of the things that you can
do for yourself is you can integrate these two parts
of yourself, you can start to see that these are
both actually you and that they are. It's you know,
we're talking symbolically, so it's hard to put it into words,
but you essentially are integrating these parts of yourself that

(13:32):
you're denying. So, just as a very crude example with
the critical thing, you could you could say to yourself,
you know what, I'm kind of a critical person and
I have a tendency to do that, and I recognize
that and I'm not ashamed of it. I just recognize
that I'm not perfect and I've made mistakes and I'm
going to apologize to people when that happens, but I

(13:54):
recognize that that part is a part of me. I
also recognize that I sometimes will kind of almost purposefully
act irresponsible or purposely acting competent, so and that sometimes
pulls people in to criticize me, and I'm it's subconscious.
I don't really recognize it, but I recognize that I

(14:15):
do that sometimes, and I realize that that's part of me.
And again, I'm not ashamed of it. It's it's not
something to be ashamed of. It's something I internalized from
my childhood and I accept and I welcome that, and
I'm and I'm done fighting that aspect of myself. That's
a crude way of describing one path or one end

(14:38):
result or one milestone on the integration of parts of
self path. All right, number six. It is comforting since
it confirms our views of our of ourselves and our relationships.
So I mentioned this earlier in that we will look
for things that are comforting and familiar to us. And
nothing is more comforting andamiliar than our childhood. It was

(15:02):
a time when we felt people were taking care of us,
even when we're abused in some ways, we felt like
at least someone was likely watching out for us, feeding us,
clothing us, you know, putting a roof over our head.
There's something very comforting about that. That's why nostalgia is
such a big deal, you know. It's why people will
turn to things from their childhood to comfort them. You know.

(15:25):
Comfort food is often things that we ate when we
are children. Even when our childhood wasn't so great, it
still has a comforting nature to it. Regression is, you know,
just one of those things. It can be complicated by
PTSD from childhood, but anyway, our psyche will tend to,
when stressed out, want to turn to something to comfort it.

(15:46):
And one of the things that we will turn to
comfort ourselves is by recreating our past. And one of
the ways we can recreate our past is to recreate
our early relationships. So if your early relationship was somewhat
typified by again a critical father, then when you are
stressed out or when you're suffering, you might actually dysfunctionally

(16:07):
try to recreate a situation where someone criticizes you, not
because it's consciously beneficial or consciously enhancing to your well being,
but it's merely reminiscent of something that happened a long
time ago, and a part of you is soothed by
that familiarity. For some people, the childhood dysfunction is so

(16:33):
repeated that anything outside of that becomes very anxiety provoking.
For instance, again going with the critical part's change, because
it's like I'm hammering on this critical thing. It's like,
say you had an abandoning mother, a mother who was
either depressed or literally abandoned the family, or was very

(16:56):
rejecting of you, or just not very emotionally respondent or
attached to you. Let's say, yet a mother like that. Well,
when you have that repeated over and over and over again,
and you engage in a relationship as an adult and
your romantic partner is not abandoning you, then it might

(17:21):
feel so uncomfortable to you that you will force them
to reject you. This happens a lot, I'm telling you.
When you start looking at human relationships and human patterns,
you start seeing this over and over again. So it's illogical, right,
It doesn't make any logical sense. If you were abandoned

(17:45):
and rejected by your mother, you would be the first
person to know that finding a rejecting other to be
involved with is a terrible thing. It can hurt a lot.
Yet we see over and over again if someone has
a rejecting parent, they tend to be attracted to rejecting

(18:05):
spouses and tend to even socialize and manipulate the other
person unconsciously to reject them. It's a tragedy of the
human condition, but yet common. So it's part of this
is because it's just so comforting, and the absence of
that element in an attachment relationship can actually feel quite

(18:31):
worrisome to the person. Because the whole idea is it's
like well, I don't know. I don't know what I'm
dealing with here. The person is not abandoning me. This
is the unconscious speaking. The subconscious speaking is I'm in
a relationship right now, I'm going to I feel, I
feel the feels right now, I feel attached, but I'm

(18:52):
not getting a vibe that is familiar to me, and
I can't really put my finger on it. But I
don't like it, and so I better run, or I
better figure out a way to make it comfortable for
me by recreating what's comforting to me. And the thing
that seems to be missing here is an ongoing issue

(19:12):
of abandonment, so better make sure that that happens now.
A very easy way to make that happen is to
find someone who happens to be generally abandoning or rejecting
or neglecting, and then you proceed to become emotionally attached
to that person because you're very interested in that person subconsciously,
because they will give you the ability to use projective

(19:35):
identification to deny parts of yourself that you want to
deny and also recreate really relationships as a way of
again getting comfort, but also as a way of trying
to work out something for the new I realize that
as I'm responding to patron Cody right now, that it's
sort of like that list in Monty Python. You know,

(19:58):
the Spanish inquisition has two main qualities surprise in blah
blah blah, and then you know, I don't know if
you've seen it, but it's hilarious, and they keep adding more.
But anyway, I keep adding more and more things. But
another reason why we recreate our early relationships and our
internal relationship representations is because we have an unconscious subconscious

(20:23):
wish to work it out, to create a creative experience,
and and sometimes our subconscious unconscious actually gets it right.
We will find, say a romantic partner, say the abandoning,
neglecting mother, and the person wake you know, grows up

(20:44):
and gets involved with someone and then tries to make
them reject them, tries to make their their adult romantic
partner reject them. But this this other person is differentiated
enough to be able to detect what's happened and doesn't
engage in that behavior and then instead provides a corrective

(21:05):
experience by not neglecting that person, And so the person
recreated the conditions of neglect from the other, but then
the other did not reject them, and then they internalize
that experience as a corrective experience. And if you repeat
that over and over and over again, eventually the rejecting
other interject or internalization or internal relationship representation becomes less

(21:31):
and less powerful in the psyche, and therefore will have
less of a need to be defended against, will will
manifest less and less and will be a less and
less a part of the personality of that person. They'll
tend to be less rejecting and neglectful of other people.
They'll tend to be less rejecting and neglecting of themselves.

(21:55):
They'll tend to be less attracted to neglecting people. The
obvious thing here therapy right, because therapy can be a
purposeful way of providing corrective experiences. When clients come to
me and I become sufficiently attached with them through transference
and through projective identification, they will start to socialize me

(22:18):
to agree with their early relationship internalizations. And when I
detect them, which I spend a good amount of time
trying to figure out, I will try to provide a
corrective experience to help them heal or to help them
internalize a new thing and to help diminish that problematic internalization.

(22:44):
For instance, someone comes into therapy and say the critical
You know this, this is the person with the critical childhood.
They come in and they start doing things that are
obviously irresponsible, And if I were his friend or his
I don't know, his partner, I might get tricked into

(23:07):
being critical of him and say like, what are you doing?
Why are you quitting your job on such a flimsy idea,
or why aren't why don't you have a job, or
why would you? I don't know. There's just so many
reasons why people can. There's just so many ways to
manipulate others to criticize you, and believe me, their abundant

(23:29):
But anyway, so as a therapist now I have this impulse,
could because the client is trying to manipulate me to
agree with this early representation, where I, as an authority figure,
which naturally is like a dad, will start to criticize
the client. Well, if I notice it well enough and
I can monitor my counter transference and really take a

(23:51):
breath and think about what's happening to me, I can
notice that I have this impulse and then I say, huh,
I wonder if the client is now because we're attached
recreating this situation, what can I do to provide a
corrective experience. Well, that can involve me not criticizing them.

(24:11):
In fact, I can compliment them, and I don't lie.
I actually shift my approach or my narrative to actually
motivate me to genuinely compliment him. So say he quits
his job on a whim and says, I don't know

(24:32):
what I was thinking. You know, I quit my job
and I don't know. And so a friend might be like, dude,
what are you doing? Like you need to think before
you act like that. Okay, I have the simplest to
say that, I think, I say, no, that's probably we're
probably in a reenactment right now. So instead I say
to him, and I shift my perspective in my mind,

(24:53):
and I come from a very genuine place, and I
say something like, well, good for you. It sounds like
it's a to move forward for you. It sounds like
you really didn't like that job, or you wanted to
see what would happen, or yeah, a lot of people
have a hard time making choices like that, and you
did it. Just like that. How you know it's good
for you. I'm sure this is I'm sure this is

(25:14):
a good thing, you know, and I don't. I don't
have a hard time doing that because I tend to
see the world in a way that makes it easy
for me to see things positively a lot of times.
So if I do that and repeat, then it gives
him an opportunity to internalize a new representation, and in

(25:37):
the process of that, it also diminishes the critical interject
that he has inside of him. So that's the corrective experience,
and that's transference countertransference, and that's projective identification. And so
that is what I will say about that. Okay, Patroon,

(26:00):
I hope that that answers your question. And I and
let me know about your paper about projective identification as
a psychiatrist in Orleans. I'm sure you're a smart cookie
and have a lot of really interesting things to say.
And what I find is that projective identification is such
a complicated thing that each person describes it differently, which

(26:24):
is fun and also scary at the same time. So
Patron Cody, let me know what you come up with,
and stay in touch, because I love my patrons. We
love our patrons. If you haven't already, go to patreon
dot com become a patron of the podcast. We're pushing
for the next level. I think we need about like

(26:46):
four hundred patrons. I think we're at about like three
ten right now or something, and so we're really pushing
for it. Let me let me read some patriots. Someone
emailed me and said, when you'd read my name on
the air, I was freaking out. It felt so awesome.
We got Patron Egina, Margaret, Susan, Zach Bianca, Lois Courtney, Danielle,

(27:11):
Xavier Simon, April Yvonne, Jackie, David Mark, Juan Lyndon, Patron Lyndon, Dan,
Daniel Tyler, Amanda Yoshi, Yuki Yoshi Yuki, fellow Japanese person, Annie, Susie,
Kate Nills, Nills, that's a very uh see. Where is

(27:33):
he from? Probably from somewhere other than the United States. Yeah,
he's he's a he's a cool name from a cool place.
We've got Tanya and James and Michelle and Jessica and
Leslie and Kayla and Hillary and Timothy and Daniel and Ruth,
so all of you, plus many more. Thank you. So
much for becoming patrons. Like I said, we're trying to Well, actually,

(27:56):
I should tell everybody that if you become a patron,
and we get enough people to become a patron, then
the next we're close to getting there to the point
where I can actually start paying the co hosts. Incidentally,
I'll sort of spoil it by saying that I'm already
paying the co host but if we get to the

(28:16):
next level, I'll pay them twice as much. So if
you like the co hosts and you think that they
deserve to be paid, which I certainly do, then please
either up your pledge per month or become a patron.
If you haven't already. Please take care of yourself because

(28:39):
you deserve it so much. You really really do. Honestly, genuinely,
you do deserve it, and so do I. We all
deserve it. It's not just you, it's me. We all
deserve it. Let's take care of each other. Okay, but

(29:00):
later