You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper was a contribution to a symposium on ‘Archetypes and Internal Objects’ of the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society held in April and June 1948. It was published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology 22 (1/2) .
A young man who was sent to me for vague depressive symptoms and work inhibitions opened his analysis by telling me that he felt he had a little white cotton-wool man in his stomach who turned black when the patient did something wrong.
Another patient began with a recollection. When he had been looking at his dead mother, he had felt something cold in his stomach. This patient, a man in the middle thirties, suffered from severe depressive states. His condition had become very acute by the breaking up of a love relation. His mother’s death had occurred several years earlier, and whilst he had not been able to experience the emotions of mourning adequately, the memory of this sensation of something cold in his stomach kept on haunting him.
These two patients came into my mind when I started thinking about this paper, because both referred spontaneously to introjection processes; they presented their incorporated objects to me on a plate, so to speak, demonstrating neatly the two main situations which Freud and Abraham discovered as determined by introjection—moral conflicts and mourning.
Let me give you briefly the history of the concept of introjection. Ferenczi introduced it in his paper ‘Transference and introjection’ as the mechanism by which the ego makes contact with the world and expands. Freud specified this concept. In ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’ (1915c), he suggested that introjection is used in early infancy under the sway of the pleasure principle so as to include into the self all that is good and useful, a process complementary to the expulsion, or projection, from the self of all that is bad and harmful. Abraham in his paper ‘The first pregenital stage’ (1916) concluded f