Echoes From the Therapy Room: Projection and Projective Identification

Echoes From the Therapy Room: Projection and Projective Identification

you know the drill with our check in - inviting you to take a moment before reading ahead x

• How am I thinking

  what is the quality and content of your thoughts?

• How am I feeling

  what level of access do you have to sensation in the body?

•  How am I breathing

  how at ease or not do you feel as you inhale and exhale?

I am back with another newsletter with musings from therapy sessions over the last week. This one I hope you can really marinate on as the sentiments are so applicable to everyday life/interactions. I am sure we can relate to experiences of strong feelings toward others that seem to arise suddenly or disproportionately to the situation/conversation we are in.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy offers useful concepts for understanding these moments, particularly by way of projection and projective identification. These ideas and theories help us notice how feelings that we find difficult to tolerate can sometimes appear to live in the people around us.

Projection, as many of us may know, is one of the mind’s ways of managing these intolerable emotions. When a feeling or belief is too painful or threatening to acknowledge, the psyche may unconsciously attribute it to someone else. For example, a person who feels deeply critical of themselves might experience others as constantly judging them. Someone struggling with anger may perceive hostility everywhere. In this way, projection acts as a psychological defence: rather than feeling the emotion internally, it is relocated outward.

Projection is not a moral failing and is in fact a normal psychological process that all humans use. It can offer important clues about our inner world – this is what I am looking at in a therapy session – what can this projection tell me about my client’s inner world. I am also inviting my clients to pause and ask: What might this reaction be telling me about my own feelings? Often, the qualities we find most difficult in others mirror parts of ourselves that are hard to acknowledge.

This leads to my next concept I want to share; projective identification. This is a concept developed within psychoanalytic thinking, and it goes a step further and was very potent in my sessions over the last week. Here, a person not only projects feelings onto another person but also unconsciously pressures or invites that person to experience or enact those feelings. It becomes an interpersonal process rather than simply an internal defence.

The situation played out where my client felt deeply inadequate but could not bear to experience that feeling consciously. They were subtly communicating helplessness, doubt, and self-criticism in ways that left me as the therapist feeling moments of incompetence and a lack of self-assuredness. The projected feeling was, in a sense, “placed” on to me, and if it weren’t for critical inquiry and real time self-check ins of what is mine, and what is not mine, I might have been inclined to carry it’s emotional weight. In psychotherapy, these dynamics often unfold in the relationship between therapist and client. A therapist might suddenly feel confused, criticized, or unusually protective without an obvious reason. Rather than dismissing these reactions, psychodynamic therapists become curious about them. These feelings can provide valuable information about what the client may be struggling to hold internally.

Importantly, the goal is not to blame or pathologize projection or projective identification. These processes are often rooted in early relational experiences, where certain feelings could not safely be expressed or understood. By noticing them in the therapeutic relationship, therapists and clients can gradually bring these hidden emotional patterns into awareness.

In this way, projection and projective identification remind us that our inner lives are deeply relational. The emotions we struggle to carry alone often find their way into our relationships. Psychodynamic therapy offers a space where these processes can be explored with curiosity and compassion.

Can you be curious

and compassionate about your reactions, and the reactions of those around you?