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Freud’s discovery, in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), of the process through which the ego unconsciously identifies with the introjected bad object (the rejecting loved object) thus becoming a victim of its own superego, was one of the most important breakthroughs in psychoanalysis — perhaps as important as the discovery of the meaning of dreams and of the Oedipus complex. The idea that when somebody feels ‘I am the worst person in the world’, he (or she) may in fact be unconsciously accusing somebody else whose victim he feels he is, but who, through a pathological process of introjection and identification, he has ‘become’, was, indeed, a revolutionary one, and one which is still of tremendous clinical importance for us today.
Freud describes the establishing of what he calls a narcissistic identification with the abandoned object in two ways: as a passive taking in of the object — ‘thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego’ — and as an active process in which ‘the ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it’. He also describes the ego as ‘overwhelmed’ by the object. It would seem then that there is no differentiation between self and object at that point: the introjected object occupies the entire ego; except, of course, that this is not entirely true, since the ego has undergone a ‘cleavage’, and some of it has now become the ‘special agency’ that judges it (the ego who has become the object) so harshly. As we know, the superego was subsequently also seen by Freud as the product of introjections. In psychoanalytic theory, introjections leading to identifications with primary objects soon became linked with normal
development; but the kind of identification described in Mourning and Melancholia is a massive, pathological one, characterised by an extraordinary clinical event: the subject seems to have ‘become’ the object.