Projective identification is -- I think it can be supposed -- a sign of psychic trauma. Perhaps trauma and its correlate of projective identification is much more common that we generally presume.
I had often found it more than simply ironic the way that those of the English-speaking world had always seen it fit to see in my embodiment the manifestation of a particularly noxious form of colonialism, when their own historical endeavours had been so bad. I put it down to "projective identification". But now I also put it down to trauma on a national, ethnic and ultimately individual psychological level. Anti-colonial discourse has struck at their identities. However, it is hard to take such a strike at one's identity without some form of protective defensive measure. I have found that those of the English speaking world are generally quite happy to accept that colonialism "was wrong"; however, they are not able to do it without seeing themselves as the expressions of redeemed goodness and light, and myself as the present manifestation of evil "in our midst".
I have found that people are inclined to projectively identify me as the evil they do not wish to face, in terms of their own colonial identities, and national historical memories. I manifest to them the splitting of their own psyches as they disavow their colonial past, in order to seem pure to themselves in the present.
This tactic of splitting is what is always is -- subconcious, defensive, and protective of the identity that remains. However, I have diagnosed in it a sickness. The need to seem purer than pure (on the basis of disavowing a colonial past) makes the society that has it incapable of approaching human relations apart from on the basis of rather sterile terms, which -- on the basis of splitting -- ends up giving all whites one, immutable identity (as a whole!) and all blacks (as a whole!) another. While this is a way of strengthening and protecting the collective identity of English speaking whites that remains (after the anti-colonial discourse has attacked), it also leads to political blunders.
A political blunder is to find oneself speaking in terms of blacks and whites not in terms of different cultural groupings but as separate moral entities. Such a salient political fiction -- that whites and blacks have different moral modes of operation in all respects -- can generate, at its least product, the tone of surprise I encountered in a friend recently, when he saw fit to exclaim that he hadn't fathomed it possible, before now, that blacks could ever be cruel to blacks. It genuinely surprised him, since he had internalised the notion of different moral modes of operation (the general pattern of this fiction is that whites are evil for morally redeemed so long as they watch their colonial tendencies and blacks are good, so long as they are not oppressed by whites alone).
This mode of splitting of consciousness and of the national psyches of English speaking nations, no doubt plays into Mugabe's present strategy to paint the "West" as intervening in a post-colonial fashion in Zimbabwe's affairs -- a logical and indeed inescapable conclusion IF blacks and whites really do have different moral modes of operating in the world. And, of course, it has post-colonial guilt to back it up.
So it is that teenagers and other innocents can become victims of multiple rapes, without end, whilst "the West" sits on the sidelines and observes the happenings.
After all, according to the logic of splitting and projective identification, that is "an African affair".
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