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Projecting parts of the self into another in phantasy, often evoking matching feelings in that person.

Projection 1946 Projective identification grew out of Klein's account of projection. When split-off parts of the self are projected into the mother, she is felt to contain them and to be the bad (or good) self, and an identification follows that Klein takes as the prototype of aggressive object relations. She speaks of 'projective identification' in the same paper and gave the term its formal introduction in the 1952 revision.
Splitting 1946 In Klein's account projective identification presupposes splitting: what is projected into the object are parts of the ego that have first been split off, and she treats excessive splitting and projective identification together as what weakens the ego in the earliest position of infancy, which the 1946 paper calls paranoid or schizoid and which she later named paranoid-schizoid.

Herbert Rosenfeld 1947 Rosenfeld's 1947 case was the first clinical paper to use Klein's newly named projective identification, and he later sorted its forms by motive: communicative projections the analyst can contain, as against evacuative and controlling ones aimed at denying separateness and dependence.
Hanna Segal 1957 Segal used projective identification to account for disturbances of symbol formation in psychotic patients, and later, after Bion, separated its pathological form from its normal, communicative use.
Wilfred Bion 1959 Bion took Klein's projective identification beyond a phantasy of the patient to a form of communication: in its normal form the infant puts feelings into the mother so that she can bear and transform them.

Symbolic equation 1957 Segal explains the symbolic equation by Klein's projective identification: when it is excessive, part of the ego is identified with the object, and the symbol, a creation of the ego, is then identified with the object it stands for.
Narcissistic object relations 1964 The omnipotent narcissistic object relation rests on projective and introjective identification: parts of the self are put into the object, and the object is taken in as if it were the self, so that no separate object is acknowledged.
Analytic third 1994 Ogden recast projective identification as a form of the analytic third, the subjugating third, in which the separate subjectivities of analyst and patient are partly subsumed and then reclaimed.