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The author's purpose is 'to deal with one special facet of anxiety, that of social anxiety which is a situational reaction always involving the presence of other people'.
The analysis of a young man suffering from lack of initiative, passivity and
impotence bares the intricate interplay of projection and incorporation which follow one another in a vicious cycle. His dangerous father must be destroyed by incorporation (intake of food), although he must again be eliminated because he would destroy the patient. Yet the fæces might be eaten by people who would then become dangerous like his father and therefore the elimination must be compulsively undone.
One period of the analysis was dominated by a series of persecutory ideas. The pivot of the patient's disease is the instability of his identification, which compelled him to project the incorporated father onto the environment. In this respect he is like a phobic and he defends himself against the phobia by avoidance and by reincorporation. The environment becomes dangerous 'through incorporation of the patient's projection'. The similarity with persecutory delusions is stressed.