The relationship between the personal and the social is one of the greatest problems that humans face when they are in society. Every culture has attempted to tie people together, something that has always been controversial. One of the most difficult phenomena that scientists and philosophers have had to explain is the propagation of emotion between people. In this sense, the Tavistock model attempts to explicate the induction of emotional states in others through projective identification.
It is important to contemplate such a process because it distorts reality not just for one person, but for others as well. For example, a group therapist may be lured into performing a role in the patients’ fantasies (Horowitz, 2014, p. 102-103). A person that performs projective identification not only attempts to mar his or her own reality, but to get the other people around him or her to perform their prescribed role as well.
The kind of group and systems phenomena that it is intended to explain is the unreal emotions that a person may feel towards another. The absence of introjection leads to the unabated continuation of the projective identification function, including the identity confusion (Harris, Bick & Williams, 2011, p. 134).
In the context of group work, this may be seen as transference or countertransference with regards to the therapist, or staging a scene in which the other people are led to participate. Even though this is essentially the problem of just one person, projective identification distorts the reality of those involved due to its expulsive process, in which the person is led to distort reality and feel anxious towards it.
As such, projective identification is a complex mechanism, in which the person gets rid of unconscious threatening material by disposing it onto the external objects, and is then worried about the object harming him or her. Obviously, this implies that the boundaries of the self have not been properly established.
In other words, it “refers to efforts by individuals to rid themselves of certain mental contents by projection, and to the anxiety that these contents will be returned in kind, pushed back into them in the context of weak ego boundaries” (Horowitz, 2014, p. 100). This may happen with everyday objects, but with people as well, with a person shoving a characteristic onto the other person, only to be then frightened about it coming back to harm the original person.
As it seeks to explain a very complicated process, the concept of projective identification is a very ambiguous and elusive concept. The first problem is that it departs from psychoanalysis, keeping many of its constructs that are not empirical. Thus, one can never really see the splitting of the ego or the mechanism of projection in an everyday, non-clinical setting, which it entails.
Therefore, it rests on many postulates that have not been found to be true, and could be just as applicable as any other that a person could dream up. Projective identification may only be diagnosed by another person, yet the question then arises of what if the person is distorting reality as well. Therefore, its identification rests ambiguous, as it does not depend on empirical data, but on the authority that the other person may have.
As the Tavistock model is not the only theory that attempts to explain how this works. The induction of emotional states has long been completed by different psychological theories. For example, Sigmund Freud described this process of mass hysteria through identification. Nevertheless, this has many of the same problems as the Tavistock model because they have the same source: the unconscious. “In the Tavistock model, psychic life is motivated by the libido and the death instic. These drives power the ego” (Rizzolo, p. 222). Another, different theory that could be used to explain this would be the intersubjective model, in which reality is formed by all the people in the group.
These theories logically vary in their usefulness. One could believe that intersubjectivity is more useful because it does not depend on an objective reality or on instincts. The Tavistock model presents an objective reality that people project themselves onto, which is problematic in that it does not make a clear distinction of what is true and what is fake, while at the same time, proposing that it does. On the other hand, intersubjectivity rests on the chaos that life is, with the different subjects attempting to make sense of it all in a collective manner.
As a whole, I believe that this to be theoretically useful, yet I would have to use it in practice so as to determine whether I find the theory to be valid or not. As for the phenomena, it is something that I have seen happen and described many times. Daily life is full of it, and one can interpret this happening in many relationships, including others’ and one’s own. Nevertheless, the concept is very complicated and does not seem to be too empirical; it would be hard to justify that this is occurring, as one cannot really see it happening. Even though I find the concept interesting, I believe that I would only truly have faith in it if I were to use it in a clinical setting. Potentially, it could be a very powerful tool to use in group therapy, as well as one’s own life.
Reference List
Harris, M., Bick, E., & Williams, M. H. (2011). The Tavistock model: Papers on child development and psychoanalytic training. London: Karnac Books.
Horwitz, L. (2014) Listening with the Fourth Ear: Unconscious Dynamics in Analytic Group Psychotherapy. London: Karnac.
Rizzolo, G. S. (2015). Rethinking Tavistock: Enactment, the Analytic Third, and the Implications for Group Relations. In R. Grossmark & F. Wright (Eds.), The One and the Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy (pp. 215-241). New York: Routledge.
