Projective identification is a primitive psychological mechanism. It involves projecting the unwanted part of one's psyche into another. Why would any parts of one's psyche be unwanted? Well, at the most fundamental level, there is the association with dirt and excrement. So, psychoanalyst Melanie Klein suggested that infants project their own excrement onto their mothers, as a way of dissociating from their dirt and becoming clean again, in their own minds.
In the case where men are taught that being "feminine" or being "a girl" is something to be despised, they will tend to project their own sensitive feelings or sense of vulnerability away from themselves in order to disown these feelings.
Women are "projected into" when men dissociate from the feminine aspects of their identities. Think about how this works. If someone only ever treats you as if you had nothing much to say, but were a cesspool of undifferentiated emotions, you might start to believe it. If that's the only way that people treat you, you imagine that they are treating you as you actually "are", but really the people who are treating you in that very particular way are forming your character by projecting a lot of their own psychological garbage into you. That is "projective identification" as it takes place within a system of patriarchal gender relations.
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