Melanie Klein's Projective Identification

Klein used projective identification as a defense mechanism to protect the ego from anxiety.

Imagine that as an individual, you have certain ideas about yourself that are intolerable to your ego and superego. You use the mechanism of assigning that intolerable feeling to another person, thus successfully portraying another as “bad” and protecting your own idea of yourself. This is essentially what projection is.
But projective identification is a bit different. According to Klein, we use projective identification for developing ideas about the world and how we in turn relate to it.

For example, the infant sees the mother’s breast as a good object and thus introjects it into his or her own personality.
Introjection means absorbing that of another person into oneself. Essentially, you could say this is the opposite of projection.

So the infant introjects parts of the mother which he or she perceives as good or bad into himself or herself, thus introjecting her properties into their own psyche.

This is how “splitting” happens according to Klein.

Splitting essentially meant for Klein; the “split” of a personality into either good or bad. There is no in-between or grey area.
Another advantage of introjecting the good object such as a mother’s breast was so that an infant could recoup into that part of themselves in times of need and use those mechanisms to self soothe.
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