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Introjection is a psychological defense mechanism where the subject replicates in themselves behaviors, attributes or other fragments of the surrounding world, especially of other people. Associated concepts are identification, incorporation and internalization.

To use a simple example, a person who picks up traits from their friends (e.g., if someone exclaims "Ridiculous!" all the time and their friends start saying it too) is participating in introjection.




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 Sándor 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. She emphasized that in failed mourning 'the impotence of the process of introjection (gradual, slow, laborious, mediated, effective)' means that 'incorporation is the only choice: fantasmatic, unmediated, instantaneous, magical, sometimes hallucinatory...crypt effects (of incorporation)'.[2]

According to Freud, the ego and the superego are constructed by introjecting external behavioral patterns into the subject's own person. Of course, Freud had a habit of looking at relational mechanisms in negative terms[citation needed].

Relational mechanismsEdit



According to D. W. Winnicott "projection and introjection mechanisms... let the other person be the manager sometimes, and to hand over omnipotence."[3]

Gestalt therapyEdit



See alsoEdit

References Edit

  1. Malancharuvil JM (December 2004). Projection, introjection, and projective identification: a reformulation. Am J Psychoanal 64 (4): 375–82.
  5. Wysong, J./Rosenfeld, E.(eds.): An oral history of Gestalt therapy. Interviews with Laura Perls, Isadore From, Er­ving Polster, Miriam Polster, Highland, N.Y. 1982, p. 6.

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