Living in Someone Else’s Bad Apartment: Not Your Place!

Human mind is extremely dynamic where plentiful activities are happening every second. Almost all the activities are so subtle, that they happen involuntarily, and here, I am not including the biological activities. To make it easier, let us talk about anxieties a person experiences daily, is there any specific number? Maybe, yes. Try asking yourself how many times you faced anxiety in the last 24 hours? Following this question, I am going to bombard you with another important question: what did you do to manage your anxiety? Did you leave it unentertained by diverting your attention to your hobby or maybe you started crying, or maybe talked about it? What if I bring something to your attention that most of the time, you throw away the anxious part of somebody else and get back to normal?

Projective Identification, introduced by a British psychoanalyst Maline Klein, is a subtle yet powerful interpersonal behavior when one individual manipulates and induces others to respond in a prescribed way. Remember that it all happens at an unconscious level. Basically, the term is a combination of Freud’s “projection” and “identification”; projection is a defensive behavior in which people attribute to others what is in their mind, for example, Mr. A and Mr. B people have a fight, Mr. A is angry and Mr. B is calm, Mr. A might project his anger onto the other Mr. B by saying, “I am not angry, you are angry”. However, projective identification is through-and-through crafty. It can always be identified based on what has been induced in the recipient’s mind i.e., the targeted person will engage or identify himself with the disowned aspects of the person doing the projection. If we take the above-mentioned instance in PI (Projective Identification)’s context, Mr. A projects onto Mr. B that you are angry, and Mr. B actually gets angry, hence the quarrel deepens. Did you see what happened here? Mr. A threw his rejected part (maybe in his inner world, it was unacceptable to get angry) onto Mr. B, and Mr. B identified through Mr. A’s anger by getting angry. Meanwhile, Mr. A felt relieved and unconsciously he made sure that it was never “his anger”. You see at how minute level, this happens?

This process is unbelievably intense and may go unnoticed, but a lot goes on in an individual’s mind. You won’t believe but it has a few stages: the person or instigator is unable to hold good and bad together as a part of self, so he desires to get rid of the bad, as he thinks that bad would destroy the self (splitting). In the next stage, the individual is going to make the recipient behave in a particular way, where he will experience the bad feeling. And finally, the recipient responds to this bad feeling that has been induced in them by behaving or relating with the individual in a different way.

One significant point to note over here: PI is not manipulation”, as it happens unconsciously. We can say that its roots lie in the unresolved splitting (when the individual is not able to keep black and white together) for example, if a person develops a feeling for somebody, and thinks of it as bad or shameful, might lead to anxiety, and to overcome that anxiety, he might impose “sexuality” upon someone by saying, “Uff! Kitnay besharam ho, har waqt he girlfriend/boyfriend ki baaten peechay krty ho”, and it can take worse scenarios as well. I hope you can observe and recall many examples from your life.

The various patterns associated with PI, but there are four major ones.

Dependency--- It is not hard to be identified, the individual projects dependency or chronic helplessness to stay in a relationship e.g. statements like, “I cannot survive without you”, “ I can’t manage on my own” or “You don’t know anything, I will decide for you”.

Power--- It is characterized by dominance and control. It is played out by inducing the feelings of incompetence and weakness in the other person. e.g., “Do exactly what I say”, “Obey me, you don’t know anything” etc.

Sexuality--- The relationships in which sexual response is elicited in the recipient, and “sexuality“ becomes the only way to be identified in a relationship. e.g., “I will turn you on”, or “I will make you feel sexually competent”.

Ingratiation--- My personal favorite; it is characterized in a relationship where the main emotional component is of self-sacrifice. This includes messages like, “I try so hard to make things easy for you”, “You don’t appreciate how much I do for you”, “You always take me for granted”.

Let me expose you to a fun fact, that PI’s base goes to your childhood (majorly it’s about your relationship with your mother or primary caregiver). However, to understand your stance with regard to PI, just be aware of how you feel in any confrontation, you can be on either side. Know your feelings, work on yourself, and stay out of this drama.

Various parts of the self may be projected, with various aims: bad parts of the self may be projected in order to get rid of them as well as to attack and destroy the object, good parts may be projected to avoid separation or to keep them safe from bad things inside or to improve the external object through a kind of primitive projective reparation

Hanna Segal