[...] However, PI takes place within a group context as well. Another notable psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1961) described projective identification in the following way: "the analyst feels he is being manipulated so as to be playing a part, no matter how difficult to recognize, in someone else's fantasy" This ongoing link between internal intra-psychic process and the interpersonal dimension has provided the foundation for understanding important aspects of group and organizational life. Bion's studies of groups examined how collusive, shared group phenomena such as scapegoating, group-think and emotional contagion are all rooted in the collective use of projective identification. In fact, sociologists often see projective identification at work on the societal level in the relationship of minority groups and the majority class.
It has been described as the basic building block for generating thoughts out of experiences and perceptions. At this same level of generality it is also described as 'the earliest form of empathy' and 'the basis of the earliest form of symbol-formation'. Looking to later developments and more broadly, the related notion of 'container-contained' has been described as 'an attempt to raise the concept of projective identification to a general theory of human functioning -- of the relations between people, and between groups; of the relationships between internal objects; and of the relationships in the symbolic world between thoughts, ideas, theories, experiences, etc.' These are large claims -- very exciting, uplifting, constructive. Yet this same mechanism is seen to be operative at the heart of autism by Meltzer and his co-workers. He also describes it as 'the mechanism of narcissistic identification... and the basis of hypocondria, confusional states, claustrophobia, paranoia, psychotic depression and perhaps some psychosomatic disorders,' as well as the sovereign defence against separation anxiety. Relinquishment of excessive projective identification is described as the precondition of achieving a fully-dimensional inner world. As he says in his essay on 'The Relation of Anal Masturbation to Projective Identification', 'The feeling of fraudulence as an adult person, the sexual impotence or pseudo-potency (excited by secret perverse phantasies), the inner loneliness and the basic confusion between good and bad, all create a life of tension and lack of satisfaction, bolstered, or rather compensated, only by the smugness and snobbery which are an inevitable accompaniment of the massive projective identification.' It has also been described as central to the most social Darwinist forms of ambitious competitive, survivalist conformism, in the concept of 'the claustrum', in which patients use excessive projective identification a desperate defence against schizophrenic breakdown. Projective identification is also the basic mechanism in, sectarianism, virulent nationalism, fanatical religiosity and blind obedience to political and gang leaders.
Psychology with public questions in mind. Freud was quite explicit in avowing his belief that all social, cultural and political phenomena were only -- and he did mean only -- the familiar phenomena of id, ego and superego, along with the Oedipal triangle, operating in a new sphere. He even avowed that 'Strictly speaking, there are only two sciences: psychology, pure and applied, and natural science.' There is, according to Freud, no place for truly social explanations; sociology 'cannot be anything but applied psychology.' Now, to revert to the rescue operation.

The first helpful notion is the Marxist critique of a well-known maxim in political science known as 'Lasswell's Formula' stating that private interests get projected onto the public realm and then represented as the common good. The ruthless economic self-interest of a Rockefeller is defended as generating good for all. He used the analogy of competition among roses leading to the American Beauty Rose, his pretty analogy for Standard Oil recently cosmetically renamed EXXON of Exxon Valdeez oil spill fame. Versions of this maxim have been offered throughout history, for example, in the self-assigned civilising missions of colonialists or imperialists.
Where did the particular conception of private interests come from before they got rationalised as the public good? This is both a familial and an ideological question. It invites us to look at both the psychoanalytic and the socialising process of development. Freud famously pointed out that the child does not acquire the parent's values but the parents' superego. This has an inherently conservative influence on the personality and provides a significant brake on social change. How we acquire values in the family? We are greatly aided in doing so by recent research on the transmission of superego in particularly distressing family histories -- those of holocaust survivors, showing us how direct and coercive these forms of inherited distress are and how they come to be acted out 'unto the seventh generation' -- or at least in the generations to which we have so far had analytic access. What is true of the transmission of trauma in holocaust survivor provides a model for how values get implanted in the process of socialisation and transmitted through the generations.
Psychoanalytic writers of varying degrees of radicalism have essayed about this, basing their own work on attempts to make sense of the rise of Nazism and its aftermath -- the classical writings of the liberal Eric Fromm, the anarchic libertarian Wilhelm Reich, and the libertarian marxist Herbert Marcuse. Whatever one may feel about their respective politics and views on specific theoretical issues in psychoanalysis, these men wrote powerful works on how an epoch's values get into the unconscious value systems of people. We're talking about Fromm's essays when he was in liaison with the Frankfurt School and his book, 'Fear of Freedom' (called 'Escape from Freedom' in America); of Reich's essays collected as Sex-Pol and his masterpiece, 'The Mass Psychology of Fascism'. With respect to Marcuse, his remarkable philosophical investigation into 'Freud, Eros and Civilization', the companion volume in which he mounts a critique of the ideology of industrial capitalism, 'One Dimensional Man' and his essays on how conformist pressures are eroding the role of the father, the superego and the family, collected in 'Five Lectures'. Making due allowance for the consequences of their differing views on how change comes about and how refractory human nature is, they share a psychoanalytic perspective on how we come to conform -- how consent is organised, how hegemony is instanced in the hearts and minds -- the unconscious minds -- of human beings.