On Internalization

When we speak of psychic life everything depends on the standpoint we take. If we take the standpoint of the sexual and aggressive drives, of id psychology, anything short of direct achievements of their aims, anything short of immediate gratification of the needs they bespeak, represents at best a detour, at worst a failure. Seen from this point of view, the whole of man's psychic life is a detour and a failure, and man may be called the sick animal. From the viewpoint of object relations as the manifestation of these needs, narcissism, psychic structure formation, internalization appear to be a second-best born of frustration, disappointment and fear, a defensive flight from reality or adaptational devices of dubious merit.

Seen from the standpoint of the inner life of man, of his inner world which appears to have come about in the ways just alluded to, the reality from which it was supposed to be an escape or to whose exigencies it was supposed to be an adaptation—this reality tends to seem an illusion. The objects, whose loss or the withdrawal from which were supposed to make such an inner world of substitutes necessary, from the standpoint of that mental world seem themselves like substitutes, fleeting, ephemeral, insubstantial in comparison with the enduring inner reality.

If we adopt the point of view of psychic structure and of the life of the mind under a somewhat different perspective, we may see the instinctual drives as elements, rudiments, as primitive manifestations of man's psychic life, rather than as manifestations of biological processes which have degenerated, in the course of time, to defensive and unhealthy forms of life which we have come to call psychic processes. Likewise, early object ties may be viewed then as necessary antecedents, as foreshadowings and portents of intrapsychic relations and structures, of the character of a man, and of his interactions with the world of external reality.

Much can be said for an oscillation between such