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.
Riviere states: 'My attempt has been to convey some introductory idea, as it were, of the fantasies we all unconsciously create of harboring others inside ourselves'. She stresses and emphasizes the point of view of Melanie Klein. Objects, both 'good' and 'bad' to the child, are incorporated and introjected. They remain part of the inner world of the individual, of all of us, to color our moods according to the drama perpetually re-enacted with them within ourselves. No person exists in isolated form but is a composite of all and any other meaningful people. In the author's words, 'we are members one of another'.
Examples from prose and poetic literature, from Donne, Samuel Rogers, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad are given to illustrate the reality of the existence of love (and hate) relationships with internalized objects. The following are some excerpts: From Donne, '… absence is presence … I can catch her … in some close corner of my brain … there I embrace and kiss her, and so enjoy her …'; from Robert Louis Stevenson, '[the reverend doctor] … moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and center of my being …'. These instances from literary imagination indicate the presence of conscious fantasies of the existence of persons within.