The author has previously studied the vicissitudes of internal images within the ego. He finds that during psychic evolution, in some individuals, there is an alternating internalization and externalization of images of significant objects of love and hate. The release (ejection) of these images is a reversal of earlier incorporation, the ego feeling compelled at certain critical phases to extrude these objects. Deep ambivalence and oscillation between activity and passivity are among the prerequisites for this process. Real individuals become the carriers, externally, of these internal images, and consequently the targets of the intense ambivalence. 'The schizophrenic ego, threatened by the loss of its object world, tries to re-create it by perceiving not the objects as such but their internalized image which becomes suddenly released from the unconscious.'