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IN THIS PAPER ON INTROJECTIVE PROCESSES, I am mainly relying on a Kleinian frame of reference and some concepts of Bion. Nevertheless, if I try to describe the central theme, I cannot think of a more beautiful image than the one provided by Freud (1917) when he spoke, in “Mourning and Melancholia” of the “shadow of the object falling upon the ego” and of the paraphrases of this sentence offered by Karl Abraham (1924) when speaking of the “radiance of the object” reflected upon the ego.
This play of lights and shadows in the quality of the internal objects acquires an almost tangible dimension in the description of the internal world and of the internal space that is central in the work of Klein. The existence of this internal space was implicitly present in the work of Freud: he spoke about the shadow of the object; this internal object must occupy an internal space. In the case of Schreiber, Freud (1911) spoke of the external catastrophe being a mirror image of an internal catastrophe.
I shall begin with a description of introjective processes that is more related to the play of lights than to the play of shadows. I wish to talk, first of all, of introjective processes that facilitate development. In the second part of this paper, I will focus on particular types of introjective processes that create an obstacle to development and may bring about the introjection of an object performing a function that is the obverse of alpha function.