Now, if you go online, as usual, you get a lot of nonsense about projective identification. We are coming shortly to the issue of collusive infidelity, which is an integral part of a shared fantasy, if you remember the beginning of the video when we were all much younger.

So now we need to discuss projective identification.

Robert Mendelssohn had written a brilliant article, published it in the Psychoanalytic Review, volume 101, number 4, in August 2014. The article was titledCollusive Infidelity, Projective Identification and Clinical Technique. And I am going to quote extensively from this article where he defines projective identification and later on collusive infidelity.

He is such a good writer that paraphrasing him would be counterproductive and would reduce the power, intensity and potency of the text.

So I’m going to simply quote from the article.

He starts with projective identification. Listen well. It’s one of the best definitions of projective identification I’ve ever heard.

Projective identification, says Robert Mendelssohn, is a term first introduced by Melanie Klein in 1946. It refers to a psychological process in which a person strives for emotional balance by engaging in a particular kind of projection. It is more complex than simple projection because it involves an interactive process between two people.

At the core of this process of projective identification is the idea of acting as if. That is, a person engaging in projective identification in this defense is essentially making assumptions about the motives and beliefs of another person. And then he acts as if these assumptions were true.

So first you make assumptions about someone else, what they believe, what they want, what makes them tick, how they’re going to behave.

And then, not having verified these assumptions, you behave as if these assumptions were 100% realistic and 100% true.

In other words, says Robert Mendelssohn, the person engaging in this dynamic projects, motives, beliefs, emotions, feelings into another person and then identifies with those projected contents, reincorporates them into himself and responds accordingly.

Projective identification, says Mendelssohn, is therefore a kind of closed circuit, which typically has the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy because it pulls the other person into the projector’s exclusive closed loop.

He gives an example. He says, I may, for example, assume that you despise me because you believe that I’m weak and that I’m destined to fail. In response to my own assumptions about you, I may then become demoralized and defensive. I may withdraw. I may give up.

And now, whether or not you truly believe to start with that I was weak and destined to fail, you most likely do so now.

So it’s irrelevant whether you had believed that I’m weak, that I’m a failure, that I’m a loser or not. My behavior, based on this assumption that you do believe it, my behavior is such that I become a loser. I become weak.

And then, of course, these agendas in the other person, this opinion. So I think that you think that I’m weak. I think that you think that I’m a loser.

So I begin to behave as a loser. I begin to truly be weak.

And then, of course, you really develop the belief that I’m a loser and that I’m weak because I am.

I created anew the belief that I had thought initially you had, even if you didn’t have it to start with. Everything in my behavior and manner made you believe what I had thought initially that you believe.

This is part of this defense that is interactive, says Mendelssohn. Even though my behavior is the result of a self-contained loop, I enact it with such conviction. I draw you in. I draw you right into performing my drama with me.

What happens when my drama also includes an extramarital relationship? Can a couple push and pull each other to enactments that triangulate and are destructive to the marriage? And if so, how?

We are coming right into the concept or the construct of collusive infidelity within a shared fantasy.

Mendelssohn continues, the very name of this defense, Projective Identification, reflects a theory that the assumptions I have made about you really actually reveal my own unconscious contents, my beliefs about myself, my beliefs about other people, including you, my own fantasy, my own affect, constellations, my worst fears, my most unacceptable feelings.

Because I cannot acknowledge these things, I project my toxic thoughts, my feelings, my beliefs onto you, onto my intimate partner. And in doing so, I can disown them. They’re no longer mine. They’re yours.

This pushing off of uncomfortable thoughts, uncomfortable feelings is, according to McWilliams in 1994, the benefit of the defense of Projective Identification, it relieves you. You are unburdened.

This toxicity is no longer yours. You have handed it to someone else.

There’s a video, a video, earlier video that I’ve made that describes this process, where the narcissist hands over his toxicity to you, gives you his poison, gives you his venom. Instead of being self poisoned, he poisons you, he exports his poison.

This is a Projective Identification.

And of course, the narcissist poison conditions you to behave in exactly the ways that the narcissist had suspected you would behave. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By inducing, says Mendelssohn, by recognizing these unwanted experiences in the other, one is more easily able to avoid becoming aware that they’re actually really part of one’s own experience.

Ogden in 1982 sees Projective Identification as a complex developmental process, not simply a pathological defense. Ogden says that the defense of Projective Identification is the key to an individual’s psychic psychological growth, because it enables the person, the individual, to expand his or her own subjectivity through interacting with others. Ogden views Projective Identification as an unconscious process involving three phases, a fantasy of placing one’s mental contents in the mind of another person, and that other person is felt to be controlled from within.

So when you hand your mental content, your toxicity, your poison, your fantasies, whatever, your weaknesses, parts of you that you disown, for example, your latent homosexuality, when you hand these uncomfortable hated parts of you to another person, that other person now has your mental content. He becomes a part of your mind. That other person is introjected. He becomes an internal object.

So the first phase is placing one’s mental contents in the mind of another who is thereby felt to be controlled from within, number two, interpersonal pressure on the other person to think, to feel, to behave in accordance with the fantasy and the mental content that was handed.

Not only do your slice off a part of your mind and give it to another person by slicing off a part of your mind and giving it to another person. You make that other person an internal object snapshotting, and from that moment you insist that the other person, the external object, should conform to the snapshot, conform to the internal object, never deviate, never display independence, autonomy, and unpredictability.

The other person is put into a procrustean bed, into a straight jacket, must behave in a way that will affirm and confirm and support and buttress the split of content, your own projected mind.

In other words, the internal object must conform to all other internal objects, objects must participate willingly in the shared mental space, fantastic mental space.

And Ogden says the third stage, the third stage is the mental content that was sliced off, split off, given to another person, is reincorporated, reincorporated as an internal object in altered form. It’s a very intricate process.

And Mendelssohn continues to describe Ogden’s work in 1982. The process of defense, communication, psychological growth is sometimes thought of as a way of metabolizing indigestible experiences or of preserving valuable experiences that the individual is afraid of destroying.

It can be reasoned that Ogden says, Mendelssohn, it can be reasoned that Ogden is suggesting that the defense of projective identification helps one to elicit another person’s help in processing difficult or important experiences and in putting those experiences into a more accessible form.

And this is, of course, secondary narcissistic supply.

The intimate partner in the shared fantasy is a repository, is a warehouse, is an external memory, external hard disk, external memory, like in a computer, the narcissist stores memories, experiences, unpleasant facts, traits, behaviors, unacceptable emotions, ego, alien, ego, discrepant emotions, stores all this toxic waste in you, in the intimate partner. And he can retrieve these, it will alter them and put them in his mind so that they can interact with the internal object that represents you. And the internal object is like an icon on the screen. When you click on the icon, a whole program opens. Yes, you click on Microsoft Word icon, Microsoft Word opens on the screen. So the internal object is like an icon in the narcissist mind, your icon. When he clicks on this icon, you open up. And when you open up on his mental screen, you contain all this content that he had given to you in the shared fantasy. And now he has access to it safely, safely, because it’s no longer in his mind, it is stored in you. You’re like a toxic waste dump. And there’s no EPA to help you, no Environmental Protection Agency.

And so the narcissist keeps poisoning you with this sick pathological split of content. And he keeps clicking on your icon, accessing you, retrieving content, altering it, and then dumping it back onto you, like saving a document in Microsoft Word.

And now we come to collusive infidelity, which is Robert Mendelssohn, brilliant construct, and ties in with Coercive Control and with the shared fantasy.

Mendelssohn says collusive infidelity is a relationship where one member of the marital couple is unconsciously encouraging the other member to engage in an illicit sexual relationship with an outsider to the marriage. Neither member of the couple is conscious of the collusion that is occurring, so that the member who is cheating is behaving in ways typical of someone who is faithful. The member who is cheating becomes deceitful. The member who is cheating, the member of the couple who is cheating, is pursuing a clandestine affair while safeguarding the secrets and conflicts of interest inherent in the practice.

And this act requires skill in deception and duplicitous behavior to hide an affair while encouraging the other partner to think that his or her suspicions are ridiculous, requires a degree of malicious lying, commonly called gaslighting.

So collusive infidelity is when the totality of the couple, the shared fantastic space, involves both members of the couple colluding and collaborating in a kind of fantasy where one of them is a cheater and the other is a victim. And the victim wants to remain a victim. And because the victim is invested emotionally in her victimhood as a dimension of her identity, she needs the other partner to cheat all the time. The more he cheats, the more she is a victim. So she encourages him to cheat in numerous ways via projective identification within the shared fantasy. And he wants to please her. He wants to cater to her emotional and psychological needs to be a victim. So he cheats. And he needs to really, really cheat. He needs to do a good job of it. Otherwise, it will not be convincing. And she will not feel like a victim. Plus, it’s very dangerous for her to come to understand, to become aware that she is pushing him to cheat. She needs to feel that she is a victim, that she’s victimized, that she is not pushing him to cheat.

So if he cheats in the wrong way, she will become aware that something’s wrong. So he really cheats.

He deceives. He lies. He hides their secrets. It’s forbidden. He does a good job of it. He acts the cheater with bravado and conviction. And he’s caught in flagrante, which allows the other intimate partner who is a victim to feel like a perfect victim. His cheating is perfect. Her victimhood is perfect. They’re both happy or unhappy in equal measures.

What about the criminal aspects of coercive control? Can we criminalize it?

Aaron Shelley wrote about it. Shelley S-H-E-L-E-Y. Yes, wrote about it. And I would like to describe, for example, the situation in the United Kingdom where I think there’s the most advanced understanding, actually, of coercive control, ambient abuse, harassment, stalking. They’re all criminalized in the United Kingdom and in Canada to a much bigger degree, much larger degree, much more advanced degree than, for example, even in Scandinavia or in the United States.

So there’s an article which I strongly recommend, criminalizing coercive control within the limits of due process by Aaron Shelley.

The sociological literature, I’m quoting from the article, the sociological literature and domestic abuse shows that it is more complex than a series of physical assaults.

Abuses use coercive control to subjugate their partners through a web of threats, humiliation, isolation, and demands.

I would add to this projective identification within a shared fantasy, projective identification within a shared fantasy, including the kind of projective identification that involves collusive infidelity. That’s a form of ambient coercive control.

One of the partners controls the behaviors of the other partner through emotional blackmail, through intimidation, through exposure, through threats, including the threat of suicide.

So there’s a lot, and this is very typical in codependent relationships.

Relationships with the codependent is a form of coercive control by the codependent. Definitely relationships with borderlines involve coercive control by the borderline intimate partner.

I’m continuing with Aaron Shelley.

The presence of coercive control is highly predictive of future physical violence and is in and of itself also a violation of the victim’s liberty and dignity.

In response, to these new understandings in the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom has recently criminalized nonviolent coercive control, making it illegal. Two on two or more occasions cause serious alarm or distress to an intimate partner that has a substantial effect on her day-to-day activities.

Such a vaguely drafted crime would raise insurmountable due process problems under the U.S. Constitution, for example.

Should the states in the United States wish to address the gravity of the harms of coercive control?

However, this article proposes an alternative statutory approach. It argues that a state legislature could combine the due process limits to traditionally enterprise related offenses such as fraud and conspiracy with the goals of domestic abuse prevention, this way creating a new offense based upon the fraud-like nature of coercively controlling behavior.

The article argues that the most useful legal framework for defining coercive control is similar to that of common law fraud and that legislatures should adopt the sign to the requirements of fraud to the actus reus of coercive control.

In so doing, this article also argues that it is risky for legislatures to punish gender-correlated offenses with specialized legal solutions rather than recognizing the interrelationship between such offenses and other well-established crimes.

When the article says fraud, fraud is the shared fantasy in effect.

Section 76 of the United Kingdom’s Serious Crime Act 2015 criminalizes causing someone to fear that violence will be used against them on at least two occasions or generating serious alarm or distress that has a substantial effect on their usual day-to-day activities.

As the Director of Public Prosecutions put it at the time, coercive control can limit victims’ basic human rights, such as their freedom of movement and their independence, being subjected to repeated humiliation, intimidation or subordination, and this can be as harmful as physical abuse, with many victims stating that trauma from psychological abuse had a more lasting impact than physical abuse.

Due to research showing that coercive control both imposes devastating harm on victims and predicts future physical violence, this research, in cases where the victim is not physically prevented from living, raises the question is how to criminalize conduct that can be highly subjective or interpretive, but criminalize it must be.

Thank you for listening.