Experience
Projective identification differs from simple projection in that projective identification can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby a person, believing something false about another, relates to that other person in such a way that the other person alters their behavior to make the belief true. The second person is influenced by the projection and begins to behave as though he or she is in fact actually characterized by the projected thoughts or beliefs, a process that may happen outside the awareness of both parties involved.
The recipient of the projection can suffer a temporary loss of insight, a sense of experiencing strong feelings of being manipulated so as to be playing a part, no matter how difficult to recognise, in somebody else's phantasy. One therapist, for example, describes how "I felt the progressive extrusion of his internalised mother into me, not as a theoretical construct but in actual experience. The intonation of my voice altered, became higher with the distinctly Ur-mutter quality."
In everyday life, it can happen that the recipient feels almost kidnapped or coerced into carrying out the unconscious phantasy of the projector. In extreme cases, the recipient can lose any sense of self - to become inhuman, a moving bag of skin, with important symbolic messages rattling about inside - and may find themselves acting out in attempts at self-exorcism; the attempt to rid the self of projections or possession.
Read more about this topic: Projective Identification
Famous quotes containing the word experience:
“What we men share is the experience of having been raised by women in a culture that stopped our fathers from being close enough to teach us how to be men, in a world in which men were discouraged from talking about our masculinity and questioning its roots and its mystique, in a world that glorified masculinity and gave us impossibly unachievable myths of masculine heroics, but no domestic models to teach us how to do it.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of his enthusiasm, and there are now men,—if indeed I can speak in the plural number,—more exactly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible, that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest of sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My speaking is irregular. Sometimes quite good, sometimes not, but generally will do.... I am too far along in experience and years both for this business. I do not go into [it] with the zest of old times. Races, baseball, and politics are for the youngsters.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)