Why We Make Others Feel Bad: understanding projective identification
This Jungian Life Podcast
Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, Lisa Marchiano
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2024
⏱️ 80 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do we invisibly transfer our emotions to others, and what magic lies in revealing this unseen dance?
Projective identification is like unconsciously tossing our feelings into someone else, a behavior first noticed in babies with their moms. It's an invisible way we influence others based on our buried issues, avoiding dealing with our tough emotions by making others express them for us. Facing up to this pattern can help us understand ourselves better and grow. Often, this cycle kicks off with blaming others, triggering a domino effect that reveals deeper, hidden struggles within us.
Prepare to discover…Melanie Klein's pivotal role in defining projective identification through her studies on infants and maternal interactions; when its relevant to personal dynamics and psychoanalysis; how projective identification works as a defense mechanism; what projective identification involves, its mechanisms, and its manifestations in daily relationships and therapy; where projective identification occurs, from personal to clinical contexts, highlighting its broad applicability; whether projective identification is conscious or unconscious; which theoretical perspectives and analysts contributed to the understanding of projective identification; why projective identification is significant in understanding human behavior, particularly in emotional communication, relationship dynamics, and therapeutic interventions…and so much more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this Jungian life. |
| 0:03.0 | Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee, |
| 0:09.0 | invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. |
| 0:22.0 | I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. |
| 0:27.0 | I'm Deborah Stewart, a youngian analyst on Cape Cod. God. |
| 0:37.0 | Hello everyone. Today we decided we would go back to some core ideas that are a psycho analytic and also inform |
| 0:48.1 | Jungian work. Today we're going to talk about projective identification. |
| 0:54.0 | Now some of you may think that that's maybe an obscure clinical term, |
| 1:00.0 | but as we unpack it, I think he'll come to appreciate that it is something that is much more common than we realize. |
| 1:08.0 | Sometimes we generate this kind of behavior. |
| 1:12.5 | Sometimes we are subject to it. |
| 1:15.2 | By understanding how this works, |
| 1:18.0 | we can become more skillful at navigating this kind of provocative defense. |
| 1:26.4 | Melanie Klein is the one who noticed this based on infant observations and in a nutshell. |
| 1:37.5 | What she observed is that infants will actually project certain material into the mother as a way of trying to contain the intensity of their own growing psychological |
| 1:50.0 | life. |
| 1:51.0 | And mothers will often report feeling sweeps of intense primal feelings. |
| 1:58.0 | As we grow sometimes as adults we will fall down into that primal level of consciousness and |
| 2:09.0 | we'll find ourselves as adults doing a similar thing, projecting a feeling into someone else and then |
| 2:18.1 | subtly provoking that person to demonstrate the feeling. |
| 2:24.0 | So that's what we're going to jump into today. |
... |
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