The dream came on a night I have not forgotten. My daughter was six months old. My client — a teenage girl I have written about as Tammy, somewhere in the long middle of what would become a seven-year therapy and the case at the heart of Analytical Psychology and Family Systems — was in the most difficult passage of her work with me. The dream felt true the moment it began.

In it, Tammy was imprisoned in a tall tower. Her captive heart echoed through the city block like a forlorn prayer. She escaped the tower — somehow, miraculously — but the moment she was free she was caught in a dense fog. The fog was not weather. It was corrosive. It was a serpent. It made her skin itch. I watched it stripping her of her divine armor, leaving her vulnerable to the chilling bite of doubt and despair. I yearned to be her guardian angel, to take her hand and lead her to safety, and I could not. I was Peter sinking beneath the waves. When I woke, the darkness stayed in the room with me. I could not return to sleep. Something in me had been separated from the light of Christ.

A dream of that intensity, in a clinician’s life, is not a private event. It is data. The first thing I did, after I had gathered myself enough to think, was reach for the phone and call my colleague Harvey Cohen — a remarkable mensch and a marriage and family therapist in Santa Cruz, and one of the people I have learned, over thirty-five years, to call when the work has gotten inside me past the point where I can metabolize alone. Harvey listened. We met for coffee a few days later. By the end of that conversation I had begun to understand what the dream was telling me, and the understanding was not flattering. I had unconsciously projected my own anima — the inner feminine figure every man carries, in Jungian theory, as a piece of his own psyche — onto Tammy. The fog I feared was hers was, in significant part, mine. The tower she was imprisoned in had been built, in part, by the structure I had unwittingly imposed on her in my own mind. My infant daughter, whom I loved with an intensity I had not been prepared for, was entangling in my unconscious with this teenage client whose life I was trying to help repair.

This is what Jungian and psychodynamic clinicians call projective identification, and it is the single most important concept in family therapy that almost no parent has ever heard of. It is the mechanism by which unconscious material moves between people — particularly from a parent to a child, particularly in any relationship of unequal power — without anyone having decided to send it. It is also the mechanism by which a thirty-five-year clinician, working with a teenage girl in a difficult passage of her therapy, can find his own unintegrated material lodging in her case without recognizing it until a dream tells him what he has done. Once you understand the concept, you can no longer pretend that what is happening in your child is happening only in your child. The pretending is over.

Key Takeaways

• Projective identification is the unconscious process by which one person — usually the more powerful one — externalizes a piece of their own psyche into another, who then identifies with it, embodies it, and lives it out as if it were their own.
• It is not the same as ordinary projection. Projection ends at the recipient’s skin. Projective identification gets inside the recipient and is then enacted from inside.
• The concept was developed by the British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in 1946 and has since been integrated into family-systems thinking, where it explains a great deal of what looks, on the surface, like a child’s individual pathology.
• The recipient of projective identification, in families, is almost always the most attuned and least powerful member — usually a child, often an adolescent, often the most sensitive sibling.
• The work of recognizing it is not accusatory. It is structural. Every family does this. The difference between functioning families and suffering ones is whether the projection ever becomes conscious.
• Clinicians are not exempt — the same dynamic operates inside the therapy room, where it is called countertransference. Dreams, consultation with colleagues, and personal analysis are how it is caught.
• The healing move is metabolization: the more powerful person, instead of unconsciously expelling the material into the recipient, learns to hold it consciously, feel it, and integrate it.
• A parent who learns to metabolize their own projections does more for a child’s mental health than any individual therapy the child could undertake.

What Projection Is, and What Projective Identification Is Not

Sigmund Freud, who first named the defense mechanism of projection, described a relatively simple operation. A person has an unacceptable impulse — let us say, a wish to dominate. The wish cannot be tolerated within the conscious self. The person attributes the wish to someone else. The neighbor is suddenly perceived as domineering. The colleague is suddenly perceived as power-hungry. The original wish has been externalized, and the person can now feel righteous indignation toward the externalized version, having successfully exiled it from the self.

This is projection in the classical sense, and it accounts for a great deal of human prejudice, social conflict, and political pathology. When a person harbors deep-seated feelings of inadequacy or laziness that they have not reconciled within themselves, they may project these unacknowledged flaws onto marginalized groups — accusing entire ethnic communities of the very traits the projector cannot bear in himself. This is one of the central mechanisms of bigotry, and it is intrapsychic. It happens inside one person, with the other person serving as a screen.

Projective identification, however, is a different and more disturbing operation. The British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein introduced the term in 1946, and her contribution was to recognize that some projections do not stop at the boundary of the other person. They cross the boundary. The recipient takes them in — usually unconsciously, usually because the recipient is in a state of greater dependency or lesser psychological power — and begins to live the projected material as if it were their own.

Projection asks the other person to carry your shadow. Projective identification asks the other person to be it.

The distinction matters because the clinical and parental implications are radically different. A projection can be returned. The other person can refuse the costume. They can say, that is not me, that is you, and the projector either takes the material back or finds another recipient. Projective identification operates at a deeper level, where refusal is not available — typically because the recipient is too young, too dependent, or too entangled with the projector to perceive the projection as foreign at all. The child does not know that the rage, the fear, the shame, the sexuality she is carrying did not originate in her. She experiences it as her own inner life. She lives it out accordingly.

How It Works in Families

The mechanism, once you have learned to recognize it, is appallingly consistent. The clinical literature describes it in technical language; let me describe it in the language of an actual household.

A father has been raised inside a religious framework that does not permit the ordinary erotic life every adult possesses. He cannot consciously hold his own sexual feelings without violating his self-conception, his vocational identity, and his theological commitments. The feelings, however, do not vanish. They are real. They press against the wall he has built around them.

He has a teenage daughter. She is at the developmental age when sexuality is becoming a live question for her — appropriately, normally, on schedule. He looks at her, and what he sees is not, exactly, his daughter. What he sees is the figure of his own exiled erotic life, walking around his house in a body that resembles his daughter’s. He becomes obsessed with what she is wearing. He becomes obsessed with whom she is talking to. He polices her with the intensity of a man fighting the wrong opponent.

The daughter, who is fifteen and devoted to him and structurally dependent on his love, does not perceive the projection. She perceives only that her father suddenly seems to think she is a particular kind of girl, and she begins — without any conscious decision — to become that kind of girl. She dresses provocatively. She makes choices that would have been unthinkable a year earlier. She acts out the script she has been unconsciously handed. From the inside, she experiences her behavior as her own. From the outside, a clinician with the right training can see, almost immediately, what is happening.

This is the central dynamic of the seven-year case I document in the book. It is not a story about one unusual family. It is a story about an extremely common process that operates, in milder or sharper forms, in nearly every family I have ever worked with. The specifics vary. The mechanism does not.

Why It Lands on the Most Sensitive Child

There is a question parents always ask once they begin to understand the concept. Why this child? Why not the other one? They were raised the same way.

They were not raised the same way. Two children in the same family inhabit, psychologically, very different families — because each child has a different temperament, a different position in the sibling order, a different relationship to each parent’s particular wounds, and a different degree of permeability to unconscious material. The child most likely to receive projective identification is the child with the highest emotional sensitivity and the lowest defensive armor. She is, almost by definition, the child most attuned to the family’s unspoken life.

Klein recognized this in her clinical work with children, and she connected it to what she called the paranoid-schizoid position — a developmentally early state in which the infant’s psyche cannot yet hold the contradictions of love and rage, good and bad, idealization and aggression, inside a single experience. Children in this position split their world. They direct love toward one figure and rage toward another. The aggression has to go somewhere. If it cannot be held within the developing self, it gets projected — and the recipient, who in early life is almost always a parent or sibling, takes it in.

In adult families, the same primitive operation is still available when stress overwhelms the adult ego. A parent who cannot bear his own aggression splits it off and locates it in his teenager. A mother who cannot bear her own envy splits it off and locates it in her sister-in-law, or in her own daughter, or in the neighbor. The splitting is automatic. It is a defense, not a decision. But the cost of the defense is paid by the recipient, who is now living material that originated elsewhere and has no way to know it.

Murray Bowen named the systemic version of this dynamic the family projection process. In his words, a situation that begins as a feeling in the parent becomes a reality in the child. The triangulated child takes on the parental anxiety, develops a lower level of differentiation than her siblings, and carries forward into adulthood a higher degree of unresolved attachment to the parents. Bowen’s biology and Klein’s depth psychology converge on the same observation. The unconscious material is contagious. The most permeable family member catches it.

What This Looks Like When You Are the Parent

I want to speak directly to the parents reading this, because the clinical literature can make the dynamic sound abstract, and it is anything but.

You will know you are projecting onto a child when your reactions to that child are disproportionate to the events that triggered them. The nine-year-old has not done her homework. Reasonable parental responses range from mild to firm. If your response is volcanic — if the disappointment you feel is not the disappointment of a parent whose child has not done her homework but the disappointment of someone whose entire self-concept is being threatened by the failure of a third grader — something else is going on. The third grader has stepped on a mine you laid down decades ago, before she was born.

You will know you are projecting onto a child when the qualities you cannot stand in her are qualities you also cannot stand in yourself, or qualities you have spent your life refusing to develop in yourself. The teenage daughter’s loudness, the teenage son’s tenderness, the eight-year-old’s emotional intensity, the eleven-year-old’s quietness — these provoke the strongest parental reactions when they touch material the parent has had to exile in order to be the kind of adult their family of origin permitted.

You will know you are projecting onto a child when you find yourself describing her, even in your own private thoughts, in language you would never use about anyone else. She is manipulative. She is selfish. She is exactly like her aunt who I cannot stand. She is the kind of girl who will end up pregnant at sixteen. These framings are diagnostic. The strength of your conviction that your child is this thing is usually a measure of how badly your unconscious needs her to be it, so that you do not have to be it yourself.

The qualities your child carries that you cannot stand are usually the qualities you have been most successful at refusing to know in yourself.

What the Dream Was Telling Me

Return for a moment to the dream I described at the beginning of this essay, because I want to be clear about what consultation with Harvey Cohen actually surfaced. The dream was not, primarily, about Tammy’s situation. The dream was about me. The fog in the dream was made of material I had been carrying without recognizing — anxieties about my own infant daughter’s future, about her vulnerability in a world I could not control, about the kind of father I would manage to be — and that material had begun to lodge itself in my work with a teenage client whose actual situation rhymed, in distant ways, with my own deepest paternal fear. I was not failing Tammy in any obvious sense. The therapy was, by most measures, going well. But the unconscious does not measure progress in those terms. The unconscious knew that something had crossed a line, and the dream was the announcement.

This is the same dynamic that operates in every home, every day, without a colleague to call. The feelings your child evokes in you are signals. Some of them are about you. Some of them are about the child. A startling number of them are about material the child has unconsciously absorbed from you, that is now being pressed back into your awareness through her behavior — your own projection, returning to you in the body of your daughter or son, asking to be reclaimed. The work of family therapy, at its deepest, is to make a parent capable of receiving that signal without re-projecting it. The work of being a parent who does not require therapy is the same work, conducted alone, against considerably steeper odds.

Metabolization: The Healing Move

The technical word for what a parent or therapist must learn to do with this material is metabolization. It is borrowed from biology, where it describes the process by which the body breaks down food into its useful components. The psychic version is structurally similar. Projected material, when it is metabolized rather than retransmitted, gets broken down into something the recipient can integrate rather than be poisoned by.

The metabolizing parent is the parent who, on receiving the unconscious projection — feeling, for example, the rage their child is carrying on the family’s behalf — sits with the rage rather than re-projecting it. The parent feels it. The parent identifies it as theirs, or as something the family has been collectively carrying, rather than as an indictment of the child. The parent works with it, in therapy or in honest reflection or in conversation with a trusted witness, until the rage has a name and a shape and a place to live within the parent’s own integrated personality.

This is slow work. It is not a single insight. It is, over months and years, a gradual change in the parent’s capacity to host the family’s unconscious material consciously, rather than expelling it into the child. As the parent’s capacity grows, the child’s symptoms ease. Not because the child has been treated. Because the child has been released from a job she was never meant to hold.

Final Thought

The most painful sentence in family therapy is often a sentence the parent comes to speak unprompted, sometimes after years of work, in a tone of voice that has nothing to do with self-blame. I think she has been carrying this for me. When that sentence is spoken honestly, by a parent capable of feeling its full weight, the family changes. Not all at once. Not without setbacks. But the direction of travel reverses. The unconscious material begins to flow back upstream — toward the adult who can hold it — and the child, slowly, begins to be free to live her own life rather than her parent’s exiled one. There is no more important work available to a parent than this, and there is no shortcut. The dream of the tower and the fog had a final gift to offer, beyond what it taught me about my own work with Tammy. It taught me, again, that the unconscious does not surrender its material to private resolve. It surrenders to relationship — to a phone call, to a colleague, to coffee in Santa Cruz, to whatever small, faithful structure of human consultation a person has built around themselves before the moment they need it. Build that structure now. Your children, in ways they will not yet be able to name, are depending on it.

Discussion Questions

1. Name a quality in one of your children that disproportionately upsets you. Honestly examine whether that quality is also present, in some form, in yourself or in someone in your family of origin.
2. Bowen described a situation that begins as a feeling in the parent becoming a reality in the child. Looking at your own family, where can you trace such a transmission across two generations?
3. What were you, as a child, asked to carry on behalf of your parents that you can now, as an adult, recognize was never originally yours?
4. The metabolizing parent feels the projected material rather than re-projecting it. Describe the most recent time you did this, even briefly. What allowed it? What would help you do it more often?
5. If your most permeable, most sensitive child were entirely released from carrying the family’s unspoken material tomorrow — what might emerge in her that has been unable to surface?

Frequently Asked Questions

Is projective identification the same as projection? No. Projection is a one-way operation: you attribute your unwanted material to another person, but the attribution stays at the level of perception. Projective identification involves a deeper exchange in which the recipient takes the material in and begins to live it out as if it were their own. Projection happens in many ordinary social interactions. Projective identification operates most powerfully in close, dependent relationships — particularly between parent and child.

Is this just blaming parents for everything that goes wrong with their kids? No. Children have their own temperaments, neurology, social worlds, and developmental tasks. Projective identification accounts for a significant portion of family suffering, but not all of it. The framework asks parents to take responsibility for their share, which is usually larger than they initially want to see and smaller than the child’s symptoms ultimately reveal. The work is corrective, not accusatory.

Can adults receive projective identification, or only children? Adults can receive it, particularly in unequal relationships — patient and therapist, employee and boss, parishioner and clergyperson. In peer relationships between psychologically mature adults, projective identification is possible but more easily resisted, because both parties have the resources to recognize and refuse the projection. In parent-child relationships the asymmetry of power and dependency makes the child’s resistance much harder.

How can I tell the difference between my child’s authentic personality and projected material she has absorbed? Often only with help. The projected material tends to feel slightly off — exaggerated, costumed, performed in a way that does not match the rest of the child’s developmental trajectory. Authentic personality, even when difficult, has internal coherence. The clearest test, in my experience, is what happens when you do your own integration work. The projected material recedes; the authentic personality remains. What is left after the projection lifts is who the child actually is.

What if the parent who is projecting refuses to do the work? This is one of the harder situations in family therapy. The non-projecting parent, the extended family, and sometimes the therapist can hold space for the child’s reality, can name the dynamic compassionately when the child is old enough to hear it, and can ensure the child has at least one relationship in which she is not being unconsciously cast in someone else’s exile. Healing in such cases is slower and partial, but it is possible. The child does not need every adult in her life to do the work. She needs at least one.

Sources

1. The dream — https://dictionary.apa.org/dream
2. projected — https://dictionary.apa.org/projection
3. anima — https://iaap.org/jung-analytical-psychology/short-articles-on-analytical-psychology/anima-and-animus-2/
4. unconscious — https://dictionary.apa.org/unconscious
5. projective identification — https://dictionary.apa.org/projective-identification
6. defense mechanism — https://dictionary.apa.org/defense-mechanism
7. prejudice — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prejudice
8. bigotry — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigotry
9. intrapsychic — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intrapsychic
10. boundary — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boundary
11. dependency — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dependency
12. self-conception — https://dictionary.apa.org/self-concept
13. temperament — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/temperament
14. paranoid-schizoid position — https://dictionary.apa.org/paranoid-schizoid-position
15. split their world — https://dictionary.apa.org/splitting
16. family projection process — https://www.thebowencenter.org/introduction-eight-concepts
17. parental anxiety — https://dictionary.apa.org/anxiety
18. differentiation — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/differentiation
19. metabolization — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metabolize

Welcome. My name is Brian M. Lippincott Ph.D., author of Analytical Psychology and Family SystemsI’m so happy to have you as a visitor to my blog about my new book. This project is very special to me, and I hope to share some of that excitement with you here.

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