Introjection is a psychoanalytical term with a variety of meanings.
Generally, it is regarded as the process where the subject replicates in itself behaviors, attributes or other fragments of the surrounding world, especially of other subjects. Cognate concepts are identification, incorporation and internalization.
Projection has been described as an early phase of introjection.[1]
However, this meaning has been challenged by Maria Torok as she favours using the term as it is employed by Sandor Ferenczi in his essay "The Meaning of Introjection" (1912). In this context introjection is an extension of autoerotic interests that broadens the ego by a lifting of repression so that it includes external objects in its make-up. Maria Torok defends this meaning in her 1968 essay The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse where she argues that Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein confuse introjection with incorporation and that Ferenczi's definition remains crucial to analysis.
According to Freud, the ego and the superego are constructed by introjecting external behavioral patterns into the subject's own person.
Introjection is also the name of a defense mechanism, which handles threats from the outside that can potentially cause anxiety by infolding them into the internal world of the subject, where they can be neutralized or alleviated. More specifically introjection means incorporating attributes, attitudes or qualities of an absent person of high significance (for example, an absent working mother or a recently deceased relative) into oneself.
One example often used is when a child envelops representational images of his absent parents into himself, simultaneously fusing them with his own personality.
Individuals with weak ego boundaries are more prone to use introjection as a defense mechanism. According to Donald Woods Winnicott "projection and introjection mechanisms... let the other person be the manager sometimes, and to hand over omnipotence.[2]
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
Wikis
Quiz
Search
