In the Beginning was the Word ~ Projective Identification

- Chapter Ten -

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
~ In the Court of the Crimson King ~

- chapter index -
pg. 1 - Intro: The Schizoid Man | pg. 2 - Night Sounds
pg. 3 - Welcome to the Machine | pg. 4 - The Laboratory
pg. 5 - Agamemnon | pg. 6 - Prometheus
pg. 7 - Paranoia's Poison Door | pg. 8 - Projective Identification
pg. 9 - The Promethean Rebel | pg. 10 - Aries and the Emperor
pg. 11 - Mirrors | pg. 12 - In the Beginning was the Word
pg. 13 - Death Seed | pg. 14 - I Talk to the Wind
pg. 15 - Said the Straight Man to the Late Man | pg. 16 - Epitaph
pg. 17 - Apollo | pg. 18 - The Fate of All Mankind
pg. 19 - Malkuth

- page index -
Blood Rack Barbed Wire

site index

"Projective identification is a phantasy of projecting the whole, or a part of, oneself into another object, taking possession of it, and attributing to the object one's own characteristics. The motives for projective identification are varied, like the wish to possess an ideal object and fuse with it; or getting into the bad object to attack or take over its assumed power; and many others; in particular it abolishes separateness."

- Biography of Melanie Klein

"Attacks on the mother's breast develop into attacks of a similar nature on her body, which comes to be felt as it were as an extension of the breast, even before the mother is conceived of as a complete person. The phantasied onslaughts on the mother follow two main lines: one is the predominantly oral impulse to suck dry, bite up, scoop out and rob the mother's body of its good contents... The other line of attack derives from the anal and urethral impulses and implies expelling dangerous substances (excrements) out of the self and into the mother. Together with these harmful excrements, expelled in hatred, split-off parts of the ego are also projected onto the mother or, as I would rather call it, into the mother. These excrements and bad parts of the self are meant not only to injure but also to control and to take possession of the object. In so far as the mother comes to contain the bad parts of the self, she is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad self.

'Much of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed towards the mother. This leads to a particular form of identification which establishes the prototype of an aggressive object-relation' (Klein, 1946, pp. 7-8).

Note carefully that we have here the model — the template, the fundamental experience — of all of the aggressive features of human relations."

- Human Nature

"Phantasies - becoming more elaborate and referring to a wider variety of objects and situations - continue throughout development and accompany all activities. Indeed, Klein stresses that 'the influence of unconscious phantasy on art, on scientific work, and on the activities of every-day life cannot be overrated."

- Essentials of Kleinian Theory

"In the Paranoid-Schizoid position projective identification is employed to, in phantasy, place the good part-self or part-object into another for safekeeping, or the bad part-self or part-object into another in order to evacuate it and keep it at a safe distance from the good self and object. Persecutory anxiety emerges in the face of this projected badness (a paranoid state of affairs)."

- The Pre-Oedipalizing of Klein in (North) America:

"In projective identification parts of the self and internal objects are split off and projected into the external object which then becomes possessed by, controlled and identified with the projected parts"

- Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (p. 27)

"The purpose of paranoia is....to ward off an idea that is incompatible with the ego,
by projecting its substance into the external world."

- Freud, 1895, 'Draft H. Paranoia'

"The strategy of science has been to see the world and its phenomena as being "out there". This strategy of seeing reality as being objective has been the fundamental, scientific posture since the Enlightenment."

- Thinking Refracted in Organisations;
the Finite and the Infinite/ the Conscious and the Unconscious.

"Fear, hate and envy are so feared that steps are taken to destroy awareness of all feelings … the effect is to enable the infant to obtain … material comforts without acknowledging a live object on which these benefits depend."

- W. R. Bion, Learning from Experience, p. 10 (1965)

" Destruction of 'awareness of all feelings ' depersonalises the ego and makes possible the depersonalisation of objects. With both self and objects reduced to 'inanimate things', there can be no 'understanding' and no beginning of 'personal relationships'. The creation of the infantile schizoid personality has begun, with its inability to feel and love, and ability to introject and project what cannot be understood, or related to except by fear and hate."

- Learning From Experience, book review by Harry Guntrip

"Projective identification (of which splitting is an integral part) is also the basic mechanism in, sectarianism, virulent nationalism, fanatical religiosity and blind obedience to political and gang leaders."

- Melanie Klein

"Too often, social environments are overcast with projective identifications. In this case, ‘stimulating’, in the sense of providing a perversely ‘good container’ for projective identifications, which follow unobserved, in an authentic ‘cross-fire’. Hate follows undisturbed, in the form of contempt of life, lack of scruples and a cunning use of projective identification. Politicians and all sorts of group leaders use it, either conscious or unconsciously."

- Bion's War Memoirs

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"Blood rack barbed wire
Politicians' funeral pyre"

"It is now time to ponder a passage from Hanna Segal about the political implications of Klein's views on how hunger gnaws:

'From the beginning the infant forms some object relationships, predominantly in phantasy. In her view, the outward deflection of the death instinct postulated by Freud creates the fantasy of a deathly bad object... First we project our destructiveness into others; then we wish to annihilate them without guilt because they contain all the evil and destructiveness' (Segal, 1988, pp. 50-51).

When we read accounts of the genocide of the Conquistadors, the Stalinists, the Germans, the Kampucheans, the Americans or the Iraqis, we must ask what has been projected into these people from the most primitive parts of their tormentors. Similarly, when we see the behaviour of drunken Indians or Esquimos or the fawning of black film actors such as Step'n Fetchit or the behaviour of Mafiosi as represented by Brando, Jews like Dickens' Fagin as played by Alec Guiness or Americans as played by John Wayne - then we must note how such projections take root and evoke stereotypes."

- Benign and Virulent Projective Identification in Groups and Institutions

"Innocents raped with napalm fire"

"Torn flesh, splintered bones, screaming agony are bad enough. But perhaps most heart rending of all are the tiny faces and bodies scorched and seared by fire. Napalm, and its more horrible companion, white phosphorus, liquidize young flesh and carve it into grotesque froms. The little figures are afterward often scarcely human in appearance, and one cannot be confronted with the monstrous effects of burning without being totally shaken....The initial urge to reach out and soothe the hurt was restrained by the fear that ash-like skin would crumble in my fingers."

- On Genocide by Jean Paul Sartre

"Innocents" also refers to "virgin" Nature, untouched/unspoiled by man.

"In well over ten years of warfare in Vietnam, the United States:
Dropped eight million tons of bombs.
Dropped 400,000 tons of napalm. Destroyed over 40 percent of Vietnam's plantations and orchards.

Sprayed 12 to 15 million gallons of Agent Orange. In 1990, an official U.S. report concluded that there was no cancer caused by Agent Orange. The tests had been conducted on Americans stationed on ships off the coast of Vietnam.
Left ten million people homeless.
Killed three to four million people, including Cambodians and Laotians. Congress unknowingly funded CIA operations for Laos and Thailand.

In addition:
58,100 Americans were killed.
Over 400,000 Americans suffer from delayed stress syndrome.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans were injured and left crippled.
The United States dropped the equivalent of 3 H-bombs per day, enough to destroy the world 25 times over.
The top ten American defense corporations, particularly Dow Chemicals, Dupont, and International Telephone and Telegraph, grossed $11.6 billion in contracts."

- Agent Orange and Dioxin in Vietnam: New Findings

"There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris."

- McGeorge Bundy
advisor to President Johnson, 1963 - 66

"Masculine Reason has historically been clothed in metaphors of energy, battle, and virile penetration and set against Nature represented as a mysterious, feminine Other. The longing of the man of science was to strip away her veil with his instruments to possess her naked splendor. Beneath such rhetoric one can sense the archetypal quality of this longing. The Promethean technician is the dream-image of a boy's ego, that fragile "I" which is torn away from its mother and ordered to be absolutely Other than her."

- Prometheus ex Machina

"The image is of God on top of a pyramid, followed by males--particularly white males--and then women, then children, then animals, then plants, then inorganic matter. It's a pyramid of value and control: what is lower exists only to be useful to what is higher.

"So we name the earth feminine. It's 'she,' never 'he,' and it's 'Father' God, but 'mother' nature--the feminine, over against which our masculinity is defined. And the dominion of the earth becomes domination."

- Distorted Masculinity

"Today we talk of ‘matter’. We describe its physical properties. We conduct laboratory experiments to demonstrate some of its aspects. But the word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept, without any psychic significance for us. How different was the former image of matter - the Great Mother - that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of Mother Earth."

- C. G. Jung

"Innocents raped with napalm fire"

"Sexual terms such as "virgin forest" and "rape the earth" are not coincidental in that context, Nelson argued. He noted the historical precedent for their use, made "all too painfully explicit," he said, by Sir Francis Bacon, a 16th- and 17th-century English philosopher, essayist and statesman and one of the founders of the scientific method.

Nelson said Bacon spoke of "wrestling new knowledge from nature's womb, of seizing her by the hair of her head, molding her into something new, of penetrating her mysteries, and of having the power to conquer and subdue her."

- Distorted Masculinity

"Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) are the two master shapers of modernity as the age of technology. Most notable is Descartes's bifurcation of man and nature as well as of the mind (res cogitans) and the body (res extensa). In his Discours de la methode (1636), he spoke without equivocation of men as "the masters and possessors of nature." Not only is nature a mindless or soulless pile of inert things which, through the cultivation of knowledge, man is entitled to master and possess, but man himself/herself is visualized as the grandest machine of all. In this way, Descartes paved the way for the cybernetic theory of man, i.e., the theory of man as an automaton or a cyborg (see Barrett, 1986 and Jung, 1989).

The Faustian pathos of modern man intellectually owes more to Bacon than to any other thinkers - including Descartes. In every respect Bacon was the intellectual harbinger and architect of the modern age of science, technology, and quantitative economy: he is "the first philosopher of the modern age" (Bury, 1955: 50) who is directly responsible for generating the technological and industrial ethos of modernity."

- Francis Bacon's Philosophy of Nature

"I am come in very truth leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave. For you have but to follow and as it were hound Nature in her wanderings, and you will be able, when you like, to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again."

- Francis Bacon

"Underlying this rhetoric was the belief that Mother Nature represented disorder, which male rationality must subdue and dominate if human progress were to ensue. Mother Nature represented the undifferentiated chaos from which the mature human being (and in particular, the male) needed to escape. In addition, slipping backwards into Nature and being swallowed once again by the mother threatened the hard-won autonomy of the "masculine" ego-consciousness."

- Christianity and the Wounded Feminine

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