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Defenses

Projective Identification

Projective identification is a defense that usually plays out between two people. You attribute a feeling you can’t accept, often anger, to someone else. But unlike in projection, you go on feeling it yourself, now experienced as a fair reaction to them. Then, often enough, the other person really does start to feel it, and it becomes hard to say who started it.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person projects an unacceptable feeling or impulse onto someone else, but “does not disavow what is projected – unlike in simple projection – but remains fully aware of the affects or impulses, and simply misattributes them as justifiable reactions to the other person” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). Paradoxically, “the subject often arouses the very feelings in others he at first mistakenly believed to be there.”

The DMRS describes it as the defense of someone who has been traumatized and felt, irrationally, responsible for it. When a present-day exchange stirs memories of old threats, the other person seems to be doing something threatening; feeling powerless, the person strikes back and feels justified. The cost is that the other person is often left feeling the same powerlessness and guilt, and may back away.

Where It Sits

Projective identification belongs to Level 2, the Major Image-Distorting Defense Level, within the Immature Defensive Category. Defenses at this level guard against intolerable anxiety when conflicting images of self or others are stirred up. Here the whole other person is seen, and reacted to, “in a distorted light.” The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale placed projective identification at the same major image-distorting level, alongside splitting.

Among the immature defenses, projective identification is grouped with the depressive defenses. Distress isn’t resolved; it is played out with another person, who ends up carrying part of it.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify projective identification:

Examples

Who is dismissing whom?

Grace, a 40-year-old woman in psychotherapy, began one session with a list of complaints, ending with the claim that treatment wasn’t helping. Her therapist wrote: “As she went on, I felt increasingly exasperated and provoked.” When he suggested that she was dismissing their recent good work, Grace soon replied, “I feel like I’m doing this all wrong, like you’re telling me I’m doing it all wrong.” He paused and named what was happening: they were “both feeling dismissed and unheard.” Later he wrote that he could have interpreted the moment “through the lens of projective identification, which it appeared to be.” A cool, dismissive side of Grace, the authors explain, was often expressed without awareness and experienced as coming from others.

Barry L. Stern, Diana Diamond, and Frank E. Yeomans, Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) for Narcissistic Personality (2017), pp. 388–389

The doctor who stopped following orders

A man in his late thirties, newly diagnosed with leukemia, kept “forgetting” his medication and insisted, “I am not as ill as my doctor claims.” The consulting psychiatrist recommended treatment for his depression. Then the hematologist did something he had not done before with such patients: he left the antidepressant off the prescription and discharged the patient without telling the psychiatrist. The authors hypothesize that the doctor had “unconsciously identified with the projected ‘bad’ object” and so “acted as his patient was acting: he did not comply with the treatment.” They stress that projective identification is “a tool for generating useful and sometimes uncannily insightful hypotheses,” not something directly observed.

Thomas N. Hyphantis and Konstantinos I. Arvanitakis, Physicians’ “Compliance with Treatment” in the Context of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry (2008)

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Projection
In projection, the feeling is denied in oneself and seen only in the other person: “I’m not angry, you are.” In projective identification, the person admits the anger but treats it as a justified response: “I’m angry because you’re attacking me.” The DMRS calls it “more extensive than simple projection.”
Splitting of other’s image
Splitting of other’s image sorts people into all good or all bad. Projective identification starts from the person’s own feeling, and tends to pull the other person into actually feeling or acting the part.
Projective identification in therapy
Many psychoanalysts use the term more broadly, for any way a patient’s unspoken feelings seem to be passed to, and felt by, the therapist. The DMRS definition is narrower. And as Taipale (2026) argues, a therapist can’t simply assume that a feeling stirred up in them was deliberately pushed there by the patient.
Deliberate manipulation
Guilt-tripping or gaslighting someone on purpose is a conscious strategy. In projective identification, the person genuinely loses track of where the feeling began. In the DMRS’s words, the subject “confuses the fact that it was he himself who originated the projected material.”

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count projective identification among their characteristic defenses:

History

The term “projective identification” had been used before Melanie Klein, but it was Klein who made it famous (Taipale, 2026). It grew out of her 1946 paper “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” which describes the process without naming it; Klein added the sentence proposing the term when the paper was reprinted in 1952. For Klein it combined splitting, projection, and identification in early infancy: insofar as the mother comes to contain the infant’s bad parts, she “is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self.”

Klein’s followers carried the idea further. Wilfred Bion treated it as a real interpersonal process and a primitive form of communication: like a caregiver taking in a crying infant’s distress, the analyst takes in and “contains” what the patient cannot yet put into words (Taipale, 2026). Later writers, including Thomas Ogden (1979), described it as a sequence of steps: a part of the self is projected onto another person, that person comes under pressure to feel or behave like it, and ideally the material is processed and returned in a more manageable form (as summarized by Hyphantis & Arvanitakis, 2008).

Projective identification was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, which defines it more narrowly as a defense the person can be fully aware of feeling, while mistaking where it began.

In research, Zanarini, Weingeroff, and Frankenburg (2009) found that 290 patients with borderline personality disorder scored higher on projective identification than 72 patients with other personality disorders on a self-report questionnaire, though other defenses distinguished the groups best. With the observer-rated DMRS, Kramer, de Roten, Perry, and Despland (2013) found that patients with borderline personality disorder used more major image-distorting defenses, projective identification among them, than healthy controls.

Sources