In the phenomenon of stalking, one sees another result due to the projection of some vital element of one's psyche onto another person. Such obsessional thinking must not be confused with love; it is pure projection and in most cases will reflect some aspect of the original parent-child dyad. Just as the parent holds sway over the psyche of the dependent child, so the wounds, the fused identities, the deepest dynamics of relationship, become hard-wired into the psychic main frame. What is unconscious remains repressed until activated, at which time it is projected onto another. An obsessional projective identification occurs when the other is charged with carrying our missing piece, thus becoming the carrier of our well-being, or alternatively our greatest threat.
— James Hollis
Hollis is naming something the soul does under enormous pressure — it finds a person and makes that person into a cosmos. The beloved, the tormentor, the one who must stay: all of them drafted into service as the carrier of a missing interior piece. What looks like love is closer to a kind of outsourcing. The suffering of incompleteness gets relocated into another body, which then becomes the hinge on which everything turns — well-being, safety, the possibility of existing at all.
The parent-child template explains the intensity, but it does not fully account for the logic running underneath. That logic is something like: if I can keep this person close enough, charged enough, real enough, I will not have to bear what I could not bear then. The obsession is not irrational — it is the soul's attempt at a solution, and a historically coherent one. The wound that was relational reaches for a relational answer, which is also why analysis alone rarely loosens the grip. You cannot dissolve a projection simply by knowing it is one.
What Hollis does not say, but implies: the carrier eventually buckles under the weight. No human being can actually hold another's missing piece. The collapse of the projection — the moment the carrier fails — is not a defeat of the soul but its first real opening. That failure is where something interior becomes possible for the first time.
James Hollis·Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places·1996