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The much-debated notion of internal objects provides the practising analyst with an intuitive picture of important aspects of the mind’s inner landscape. In evolving towards its actual definition and usage in the clinical setting, the notion has suffered a radical, creative tension. This presentation will ‘shuttle’ between its conceptual form and its clinical substance. Thus it fits well in a book dedicated to the work of Joseph Sandler, one of whose main interests has been the evolution of concepts in the interplay between theory and practice.
To explore the notion of internal objects and its heuristic possibilities in clinical work, this presentation will start from those experience-near derivatives of this theoretical construct as they emerge through the discussion of clinical material. The theoretical lines that guide the analysis of this material begin with Freud’s early demarcations and definitions of the mechanisms of identification, introjection and incorporation (, , , 1923, ), and continue through the ideas developed by Melanie Klein (1946, 1958) on projective identification, which were later expanded by Rosenfeld (1969, 1983) and Bion (1970).
To explore the general usefulness of the concept of internal or internalized objects, whose outline was first drawn by Melanie Klein (1927, 1928, 1929, 1934; see also Baranger 1971), we must take into account the difficulties that derive from the use of the word ‘internal’ in psychoanalytic theorizing (Strachey 1941). Then we will examine how the notion of internal objects behaves in the clinical setting, using the definition of the internal object as ‘a structure in the nonexperiential realm, being built up during development on the basis of the child’s subjective perceptual and fantasy experiences’ (Sandler 1990:859). The notion thus defined will be referred to the experiential realm that Winnicott (1953, 1971) defined as the potential space.
Rycroft (1972) has aptly said that ‘Freud had provided the verbs for a human