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The person by whom the paranoid patient feels persecuted is one very near to him, and often reproduces the persecution to which the patient had been allegedly subjected by one of his parents. One patient's behavior in the transference showed his hostile triumph at being able to establish the incompetence of the analyst and his threat to torment him further even in his absence. Upon leaving the session the patient introjected the analyst in order to continue his attacks on him as an internal object. Heimann interprets anal-sadistic data from this patient's history according to the concepts of Melanie Klein. Masochistic practices of the patient—who arranged beatings by prostitutes—are interpreted as 1, identification with the sadistic partner; 2, identification with the internal father ('It was not so much he who was beaten but his internal father.'); 3, elimination of the persecuting internal father; 4, repetition of the patient's own version of parental intercourse according to his Oedipal fantasies.
Further interpretations, based on the relationship of transference reactions to experiences, derive validity solely from Kleinian concepts. Thus the patient's behavior toward the analyst (previously described) is compared with his driving with his mother in his car and making her the object of his accusations. It is more evident to Heimann than to this abstracter that 'the car was a symbol of himself and that in unconscious fantasy the patient took his mother into himself, introjecting her once more as often on earlier occasions. In the transference relationship he introjected the substitute object, the analyst.'
In the paranoid type of introjection that part of the ego that becomes identified with the object is split off from the rest. This combination of introjection, splitting, and intrapsychic projection (a term the meaning of which is not clear) represents defenses which allow the paranoid patient to control and limit his identification with the internal obje