Clinical Notes on Internalization and Identification

In this paper I am concerned with the theme of internalization and identification as demonstrated in the analysis of a man of thirty-one years of age, an actor by profession. He presented a picture predominantly neurotic in character with compulsive features, but persecutory and depressive anxieties were present from the beginning. The analysis was incompiete, comprising seventeen months of analytic sessions, but extending over three and a half years. It was terminated for external reasons beyond the patient's control.

Melanie Klein has shown that from infancy onwards continuous processes of internalization take place leading to the building up within the subject's unconscious of an inner world peopled by objects: These are in part derived from real objects and in part from the subject's impulses and phantasies concerning them. Internalization is followed by identification. However, the nature of the identifications made by the subject are dependent upon a number of interacting factors of which anxieties, and defences against those anxieties, pertaining to the internal objects and their inter-relationship play a fundamental part. The depressive position is the central point in the ego's history and the way in which this is met determines the success or failure with which a whole, as opposed to a part, object is installed. It is my intention to show how the later identifications made by this man were determined and affected by the character of the early internalization of his first object, his mother.

The patient was married and had, at the time of his first visit, three children. A fourth child had died a few days after birth. For the first eighteen months he came on twelve separate occasions and only thereafter started a regular analysis. His behaviour during this earlier period varied; sometimes he would sit silent for the greater part of the hour, staring fixedly out of the window at the drain pipes of the opposite house; sometimes he would express himse