Tuesday, May 12, 2015

narcissistic object choice vs. projective identification.

I've posted before about projective identification. Two people share a fixation, trauma, or are similarly defused at the same point of superego development. One takes on the role of the parental substitute and gives the other the anxiety, or the traumatic betrayal or humiliation, etc. that they had also received.

I've posted before about narcissistic object choice as dependent on psychic bisexuality. An altruist closes down their egoistic side and seeks it in a relationship with an egoist, for example. They way they describe him or her are descriptors they also used for themselves in the past and now don't act like they used to.

So, I'm still not sure what to call it when someone externalizes their superego injunctions (i.e. not the anxiety, and not the trauma) onto another person.

So there are relationships between parents and children or couples in which one side needs to command the other side to do things. The one person doesn't want to have to make decisions for themselves or notice that there are chores that are needed to be done. They will only respond to a command or list. They've effectively put their ego ideal (and will in general) onto the other person. This saves them from having to deal with inadequacy feelings when they might no know how to do something or from the feeling that if they became their own agent that they would have to spend all their time taking care of things.

Is this simply the ego ideal equivalent to the operation in which one's conscience is put onto the group leader? In this case, it's not a social group, but because of ego and object drive parallelism, it could be the way it manifests in the object drive. Maybe a cult leader could similarly have this relation with people? In the cases with parents and children who are in their 20s, 30s, and generally grown up it could be a case of a repersonalized parental imago....

In a previous post I brought up transactional analysis and the parent child interaction. This obviously seems like an example of it...

I'm just still not sure if it should be conceptually distinct from narcissistic object choice, but, at times it also seems that the "parent" can cause the other anxiety, which makes it seem like it could be projective identification...

  

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