Projective identification and hostile attribution in the group matrix: from affective induction to cognitive misinterpretation

This paper proposes that hostile attribution, typically conceptualized as a cognitive bias, may in certain contexts emerge as a secondary formation of unprocessed relational affect. Building on psychoanalytic formulations of projective identification as a process of affective transmission within a relational field, it explores how unprocessed affect within the group matrix may be cognitively reinterpreted as hostility or rejection. Drawing on clinical material from a long-term analytic group, the paper focuses on a form of eroticized projective identification in which libidinally charged affect is induced through embodied and sensorial communication. These processes generate oscillations between relational control and vulnerability and may exceed the group’s capacity for symbolic containment, leaving the shared field affectively saturated yet semantically indeterminate. Under such conditions, ambiguity may be resolved through hostile attribution. A conceptual pathway is proposed, tracing the transformation from affective induction within the group matrix to cognitive misinterpretation. By situating attributional bias within a relational and affective context, the paper further proposes a failure-path model of projective identification, in which unprocessed affect returns to the subject in stabilized interpretative form.