K believes she is angry and hates MT but it is really MT who hates himself and projects it onto K who identifies with his self hatred and disgust. K really thinks MT’s behavior is reprehensible but has no hatred for MT.
I have argued that countertransference is projective identification operating between therapist and patient. I now want to turn to the broader concept. I begin by suggesting that projective identification is the most fruitful psychoanalytic concept since the discovery of the unconscious. Of course, as soon as something like that is said, competing claims rush forward to be recognised, for example, the significance of the Oedipus complex. Suffice it to say, then, that it is very important. Elizabeth Spillius describes it more modestly as Klein's most popular concept (Spillius, 1988, vol. 1, p. 81), and Donald Meltzer calls it the most fruitful Kleinian concept over the past thirty to forty years (Meltzer, 1991). Hinshelwood suggests that as well as being a, if not the, most fruitful Kleinian concept, it is also the most confused and confusing one (Hinshelwood, 1991, pp. 179-208).
