Part II. in Honor of Melanie Klein: Clinical Notes on Internalization and Identification. Lois Munro. Pp. 132-143.

This paper stresses the themes of internalization and identification as they appeared in the analysis of a male actor who was treated for a period of seventeen months. During the course of the analysis it became clear that this patient suffered from severe depressions, hypomanic moods, paranoidal outbursts, and confusional states. Dr. Munro considered the confusional states a repetition of the patient's infantile depressive position. The patient's persecutory fears, she felt, were related to the patient's fears for himself and for his good objects because of his internal persecutors; they were related also to his distress over his good objects' suffering. Apparently in the case described there was a failure to integrate the internal objects and therefore to establish an internal good object. This made consistent identifications impossible and also interfered with the patient's object relationships. The patient thus was a container of objects and not a person; he accumulated identifications rather than integrating them into his ego. This made possible his capacity for empathy and his dramatic talent, but it interfered with the development of an integrated personality structure.