Emotional maturity, strength of character, capacity to deal with conflicting emotions, balance between internal life and adaptation to reality, and a successful welding into a whole the different parts of the personality are described in terms of the vicissitudes and fate of introjected objects. The paranoid and depressive positions are indicated as strategic developmental crises that must be mastered for healthy growth to occur. Inadequately resolved paranoid and depressive anxieties are prone to be reanimated and newly elaborated by the stress encountered in later stages of life.