Reflections on Loewald's “internalization, separation, Mourning, and the Superego”

I found it a curious experience to be asked to comment on Loewald's “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” (1962a; hereafter referred to as “Internalization”) and to think of its being chosen as one of two key articles published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in the 1960s. On the one hand, the paper had personal meaning for me. It was the first paper I read by Loewald, assigned in a seminar for graduate students at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute in 1972. I had immediately been taken with the paper (and with Loewald), as I have been with every rereading. On the other hand, although Loewald published what, in my opinion, may have been the most important psychoanalytic paper of that decade, certainly in North America, one of perhaps four or five of the most influential papers of the second half of the twentieth century, I had not been asked to comment on his “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” (1960; hereafter referred to as “Therapeutic Action”).

My commentary here will focus on what I take to be the place of “Internalization” in Loewald's work and the character of the article as Loewaldian, as well as the key contributions of the article, including its relation to “Therapeutic Action” where relevant. Tentatively and suggestively, I will say where I think “Internalization” locates