How Narcissist Invades Your Mind (Introject, Imago, Internal Object)

One example of an introject is the super ego.

A super ego is an interjection of parental figures, partly the mother and mostly the father actually.

The super ego can be analyzed and has been analyzed and broken down and reduced to component introjects.

For example, the bad father, the good father, the internal father, the internal mother, the good mother, the bad mother, etc. All these introjects put together comprise the super ego.

Super ego is the voice of mother and father telling you, this is right, this is wrong. Don't behave this way. Behave that way. In other words, social injunctions. Process of socialization involves the interjection of mother, father, their functions and the messages that emanate from these functions.

Introjection is considered a defense mechanism as well. So it's a normal developmental, unconscious, automated processon the one hand, and on the other hand, it's a defense mechanism. It diminishes or reduces separation insecurity, abandonment and separation anxiety.

If you internalize mother as an infant, as a baby, as a child, when you internalize mother and later internalize father, then you have cathected mother and father, cathected parental figures inside your mind, and while real mother and real father may abandon you, the images, the representations, the introjects of mother and father inside your mind will never abandon you because they are you, they're part of your mind and this reduces the anxiety attendant upon separation and abandonment.

Interjection is a developmental process because it increases, enhances autonomy, personal autonomy.

When you interject people, you are less dependent on object constancy.

When you have a representation of someone in your mind, you are not dependent on the physical presence of that person.

That person can travel, can go to work, can leave you and abandon you and divorce you, can dump you and break up with you.

Still, you have a representation of that person, an introject of that person, in your mind.

And in this sense, you are independent of that person and interject of that person in your mind and in this sense you are independent of that person.

Introjects enhance agency, personal autonomy and ultimately self-efficacy and they are very conducive to the regulation of a sense of self-worth and self-esteem and self-confidence.

So an introject is a hyper-complex product, the end product of the process of interjection.

It's an organized cluster of memory traces and it includes a self-representation, a representation of one's self within the introject.

So the introject has a part that represents the external object and a part that represents you and a part that represents a relationship between you and the internal object that represents the external object.

It's an object representation and it has an affective tone.

Every introject is associated with a specific emotion, a specific affect, and usually a set of specific cognitions, something that is recognizing cognitive behavior of therapy.

Introjects are not to be confused with self-image or self-perception.

Identifications can be, but we'll leave it aside.

Introjects are not what makes you feel confident, introjects don't form the way you perceive yourself and so on.

Even though there is a representation of yourself within the introject, it's only in the context of the relationship with the external object and with the internal object.

Interjects do not affect usually self-perception and self-image.

But introjects can affect a sense of self-worth, self-esteem, and self-confidence.

And again, many wannabe experts and would-be experts and self-styled experts confuse self-esteem self-confidence and self-worth with self-image and self-perception.

These are not the same terms, these are not the same processes, and these are not the same constructs.

We'll come to it maybe in some other video.

Most late life introjects are experienced, as I said, as foreign bodies in the psyche.

And so very often we try to reject these introjects because they are perceived again as intrusions. They are intrusive in nature.

And I'm talking only about introjects created in adult life, later in life.

Remember that early childhood introjects are perceived as egosyntonic and they are perceived as authentic.

Early childhood objects, introjects, are perceived to be you, part of who you are, an integral element of yourself.

While late life introjects are perceived as invasions or intrusions, and we try to get rid of them by externalizing them.

The various methods of externalizing, projection is one of the most well-known.

However, externalizing internal objects rarely works and involves invariably primitive defenses and in more extreme cases pathologies.

We come to it a bit later.

Now I keep saying representation, representation, representation. I keep saying that introjects are representations of external objects in our minds.

What am I talking about? Am I talking about a photo, photograph? Am I talking about an audio recording? We're talking about a video? What do you mean representation? Is it a thought, maybe a concept? What is it exactly?

In psychology, representation is mental, so it's psychological, and it is symbolic. It's a symbol, a symbol for the internal processes provoked by the external object.

You remember that I said that external objects have roles, they have functions. External objects create in you internal dynamics.

For example, when you fall in love, fall in love with an external object, but falling in love is an internal dynamic provoked by the external object.

So, when you take into account all these functions, all these processes triggered in you by the external object, and then you create a symbol, an icon, an avatar for the external object, and you link it to these internal processes, to the emotions provoked by the external object, to the memories you have of the external object, to the effects, to the cognitions connected to the external object.

When you've created a library of everything that has to do with this external object, you have a representation. Simple. It's a folder, a folder, with all the information about the external object, with emphasis on what the external object provokes in you, what the external object does to you, in effect. So it's about you.

That's why it's called introject. The introject is not so much about the external object. It's much more to do with your reaction to the external object, conscious or unconscious.

So introjection is a process by which an individual unconsciously incorporates aspects of external reality into the self, particularly attitudes, values, emotions, cognitions, qualities of another person, some elements of the personality of another person as they interact with the self, as they are perceived by the self, as they trigger processes in the self.

So it's about the self, not about the external object.

When you mourn someone, when you grieve, someone died, a loved one has died. Or you've been abandoned or rejected or dumped or broke up with someone. There's a process of mourning. There's a process of grieving.

And that's a perfect example of a, or it's a private case of interjection.

Mourning and grieving are interjection.

What you do, you are creating this time, consciously usually, you're creating an emblem, you're creating a tombstone if you wish, you're creating a kind of a kind of place where the mourned or grieved person is kept alive, mausoleum, where that person is kept alive, but not only the person himself or herself, everything to do with that person, your memories of that person, your emotional reactions to that person, etc.

In psychoanalytic theory, interjection is a process of absorbing the qualities of an external object into the psyche in the form of an internal object or mental representation or interject. And this absorption, this incorporation, it has an influence on behavior, often unconscious influence.

It's a normal part of development. We interject parental values and attitudes in the processes of socialization and acculturation and we form the super ego, as I mentioned before.

But it's important to realize that it's also a defense mechanism. Interjection is anxiolytic. It reduces anxiety.

And this is precisely the interplay between you and the narcissists.

The presence of the narcissists, the conduct or misconduct of the narcissists, the intermittent reinforcement, the bullying, all these create heightened anxiety.

And one of the most primitive forms of mitigating anxiety, ameliorating and reducing anxiety, is interjection.

When we are babies we interject mommy because we are afraid that mommy would go away, so interjection is linked with a reduction in anxiety.

When the narcissist triggers in us anxiety, when it provokes anxiety, we react with interjection. We interject the narcissists.

One could even say that the narcissist uses anxiety, unconsciously, it's not deliberate, uses anxiety to force us to interject him or her, to force us to create a powerfulmental representation and voice of the narcissist in our minds.

I keep saying internal object, internal object. You remember that an external object is another person, another human being is an external object.

What is an internal object? What is this mental representation that results from interjection, incorporation, internalization? Can we deconstruct the internal object? Does it have any visible contours or core or something? How can we grasp it?

You could think of an internal object as a set of mirrors.

One mirror reflects you.

The other mirror reflects the external object.

And there's a third mirror that reflects both mirror number one and mirror number two, and that is the relationship mirror.

There is a self-representation of the representative agency engaged in the relationship.

And so this gives rise to complex internal relationships which are then translated into object relationships.

This is the internal object.

It's a metaphor, of course. There are no mirrors inside anyone, but I hope you get the gist of it.

It's very difficult to capture the essence of the internal object because it's so instinctive, instinctual, so intuitive and so unconscious.

We all do this, starting with the first few days of life.

Internal object is an image or representation of a person, particularly someone significant to the individual, such as a parent, that is experienced as an internalized presence within the mind, as if the mind is possessed or occupied somehow.

Melanie Klein, one of the mothers of object relations theory, she regarded the psyche as made up of internal objects, actually. And these internal objects have relationships or relations with each other.

And she said that this network of internal objects is what we call personality.

And when some of these objects are disrupted, they become part objects. Or the relationship between them is bad, involves the relationship involves primitive defenses such as splitting or projection.

When something goes awry, then we have symptoms.

In her work, in Melanie Klein's work, everything is a derivative of and emanates from internal objects and the relationships between them.

Melanie Klein's work is very literary. It's not scientific like Freud, let's say. She attributes literal reality to unconscious fantasies, phantasy.

She says that inside us there are agencies or capacities to feel, to think and to perceive, but she failed to define them or to delineate them clearly.

And so it was left to someone called Fairbairn. Fairbairn, F-A-I-R-B-A-I-R-N. Yeah, exactly.

It was left to him to try to clarify Melanie Klein's work.

He suggested that the internal object is a split-off part of the ego.

He said, whenever we create an internal object, we split off a sliver or a fraction of the ego.

And this fraction of ego, this split-off ego, remains in a relation with an object that is partially, at least, a dynamic structure.

Again, Fairbairn failed to define the dynamic involved, the dynamism of this structure.

But it was a step forward.

How would we explain the formation of internal objects? Where is the space for them? They take space. Where is this space taken from?

It reminds me of the Kabbalah, where God had to minimize himself in order to make space for creation.

The same here. The ego minimizes itself. The ego fragments and splits itself in order to let in the light of the internal object.

Internal object which represents the relationship with the external object and the functions of the external object.

The ego becomes invested in the internal object, but this process actually changes the ego, slices off, splits off a part of the ego, and then there is a dynamic relationship between the internal object and the ego and fairbairn failed to specify this dynamism or dynamic relationship.

Fairbairn suggested the notion of the bizarre object he assumed that there is a process in which a sub-organization of the ego, the consequence of the split described by Fairbairn, presents itself to itself as a thing.

So when the ego splits off, the remaining ego, the bulk of the ego that remains behind after the split perceives the splinter or the sliver or the split of ego as alien, as a thing, as an entity, as the other.

It's a fascinating concept. And it's very threatening.

When the ego breaks down, when the ego splits, now there's a big part of the ego and a tiny part of the ego, and the big ego perceives the small ego became the internal object.

The big ego perceives the internal object as alien, as bizarre, as a thing.

There is a strangement between the big ego and the erstwhile ego that became the internal object.

And to solve this, we have the defense mechanism of fantasy.

The part of the ego that is perceived as a thing develops a fantasy together with the ego of being included in part of the object.

So, Fairbairn's work is fascinating because it is a key to understanding many dynamics in narcissism.

The split of ego and the big ego perceive the split of ego as a thing alien in effect, what Fairbairn called a bizarre object.

So they develop a fantasy. In Fairbairn's work, the split-off ego develops a fantasy of being included in the object.

But in reality, both parts develop the fantasy.

It's a shared fantasy.

These are the rudiments of the shared fantasy.

When the narcissist comes across an external object, you, an intimate partner, a good friend, the narcissist immediately creates an internal object that represents you in his mind.

But this internal object, according to Fairbairn, used to be a part of the ego of the narcissist, of the narcissist's ego or self.

In my work the narcissist does not have an ego and does not have a self, and does not have a self.

Now I'm talking about Fairbairn's work, okay, so about Fairbairn's work.

Okay. So in Fairbairn's work, this internal object that represents the external object in the narcissist's mind would be perceived as alien, as bizarre, split off from the ego.

And the narcissist would be terrified because it's like breaking down, like disintegrating.

And so what the narcissist does, he creates a fantasy.

And in the fantasy, he reincorporates the parts.

The fantasy is a fantasy of inclusion in a part of the object.

So that now everything is intermashed. Everything has been reconstructed and reestablished via the agency of the defense mechanism of fantasy.

In the narcissist's fantasy, he is unitary. In the narcissist's fantasy, the narcissist perceives himself or herself as a single entity. There's no break. There's no schism.

But of course, the fantasy is not reality.

In reality, every time the narcissist internalizes an external object, every time the narcissist interjects, there is another fragmentation, another fault line, another break, according to Fairbairn's work.

Now, in my work, the narcissist doesn't have an ego and doesn't have a self, but the narcissist has self-states.

So whenever the narcissist internalizes an external object, whenever the narcissist creates an introject that represents you, the external object in his mind, it is closely, immediately closely associated with a specific self-state.

The fragmentation is there, but it's a fragmentation of self-states rather than a unitary self. It's more kaleidoscopic.

And then you become associated with a specific self-state with specific emotions, specific cognitions, specific memories, a specific process of idealization devaluation, a specific relationship with a maternal figure.

Narcissus converts you to a maternal figure, and of course, a specific need to individuate via separation.

The self-state wants to become an individual.

And this happens to the narcissist times and again. Every time the narcissist engenders a shared fantasy, it happens again.

In 1963, Fairbairn took into account, especially Melanie Klein's work, but he was later made aware of Fairbairn's work.

Fairbairn, exactly like Klein, by the way, conceived of the ego as present at birth and capable of complete and immediate object relations. This is the perception of Ferber and Klein.

But Fairbairn said, if the relationship with a primary object, primary object is mother. If the relationship with primary object fails, the ego is incapable of coping with this failure.

It's very threatening failure because if you are two years old, if you're one year old, if you're six months old and you fail in your relationship with mommy, you're in bad shape. You're likely to die. Mommy won't care for you. Mommy won't feed you. Mommy won't give you shelter and you will die because you're helpless and you're dependent to the maximum.

So when there's a failure of primary object relationship, the ego which exists at birth according to Klein and Fairbairn, the ego is terrified.

What it does is a defense against this terror, against this horror movie of having failed with mommy.

What the ego does, it splits off aspects of the self. The ego kind of says, mommy doesn't like this and mommy doesn't like that, and that's why my relationship with mommy is defunct and is a failure. If I were to only change myself, mommy would love me.

So the ego splits off aspects of the self that appear undesirable to the mother.

And there is a fixation to an unsatisfactory aspect of the object.

This relation as a whole is repressed. It cannot come to consciousness.

If the infant were to consciously experience this, the infant would mentally die, would become essentially the equivalent of psychotic.

So all this is repressed. All this is underground, subterranean.

The dual aim of mastering emotions and creating the desired change in oneself and in the object, by changing oneself, one changes mother.

All this process is unconscious.

According to Fairbairn, dynamic ego structures possess a certain autonomy in relation to the personality, and personality is considered as unique.

But they also have relationships with internal objects as representative of external objects.

So all these scholars, Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, later, Winnicott, as we shall see, all of them were trying to grapple with the fact that when we interact with other people, we actually don't interact with them directly, but we interact with the way we see them.

We interact with other people through the agency of how we perceive them.

Similarly, we don't interact with the physical world. We interact with our brain's interpretation of the physical world. We interact with sensa, with sensory inputs, which are not necessarily authentic and loyal and faithful to the external world.

When we come across external objects, when you come across other people, and these other people become significant and meaningful and functional in our lives, we are so terrified of losing them, usually, that we create an internal representation.

And we hold on to this internal representation for dear life.

The internal object becomes the anchor. We hold on to the internal object for dear life, because the external object can walk away at any time or die or something.

The internal object is a forever. We invest emotionally, we affect the internal object, not the external object.

And in this sense, we're all, to a large extent, narcissists, or at least narcissistic.

And that was a view of all the major scholars until late in the 1970s according to Fairbairn the concept of the undifferentiated id is replaced by the idea of unconscious ego object structures.

So, Fairbairn rejected, in effect, Freud's three-partite model. He said it's all about relationships.

Fairbairn and other scholars of the object relations schools, especially in the United Kingdom, they said it's all about relationships. It's not about what happens here, it's about what happens there.

It's our reaction to the world, it's our interaction with others, that ultimately these interactions coalesce and become who we are.

It's a relational approach to the constellation, integration and formation of the self and the ego.

In 1954, Donald Winnicott, the pediatrician turned psychoanalyst proposed the notion of the false self.

Now the false self is often confused with the ego ideal. It's nothing to do with each other.

The false self is a defense organization, not even a mechanism. It's a whole structure. It's a whole construct. It's a whole personality organization.

So it's what used to be called the as if personality.

So the false self is a defense organization developed to counter the threat of annihilation and negation and vitiation. It's a form of self-soothing, the false selfsoothing and self-care. It's a manifestation of self-love, an attempt at self-preservation and survival.

The false self is imbued with energy, cathected, and it manages life in order to shield the individual and the false self from the experience of intense pressure to develop according to the internal logic of someone else.

So the false self says I'm going to develop my own way, I'm not going to react to undue influence, to the breaching of boundaries, to the refusal to separate of my mother or later my father.

I'm going to be my own man, I'm going to be my own woman, I'm going to be a big girl, I'm going to be a big boy.

That's the false self, big, godlike.

Wilfred Bion in 1962 came up with the concept of the container. The container is a process that goes from projective identification to reintroduction.

Bion discussed the unconscious fantasy of projecting into someone else the undesirable or damaged part or rejected parts of the self.

And later this can be re-interjected after modification by the container.

It's a brilliant concept. Bion was brilliant, by the way, much neglected figure in psychology.

He says we project to someone, that someone modifies the projection, and then we re-interject it, we take back, we give someone, we attribute to someone, a part of ourselves, which we are not happy with, which we reject, that someone changes that the part that we attributed or that we projected to him and then we reintroduce it.

We reintroduce it, projective identification according to Bion is a personality split and an ejection of the split of part as an internal object.

The bizarre object in Bion's work is an internal object experienced by the patient as having a life of its own. It's an ego split. The patient at the same time recognizes the self as a thing enclosed in the object.

Now this is very common in psychotic disorders, in schizophrenia, and consequently in borderline personality disorder and in narcissism.

Kernberg was the first to suggest or among the first to suggest that the distinction between psychosis and neurosis is not that clear cut, that personality organizations such as borderline and narcissism are one and the same in many ways or that borderline is a defense against narcissism, but they are all members of the pseudo-psychotic family, almost psychotic. That's why they're called borderline disorder, on the border of psychosis.

There was a psychologist Thomas Ogden, Thomas Ogden, O-G-D-E-N. He said that the internal object relationship implies an interaction between two divisions of the personality.

Each of these divisions, said Ogden, is an active agency. So Ogden was one of the precursors of the self-state theories of personality, later propounded on by Bromberg and others.

Ogden suggested to conceive of the internal object as an aspect of the split ego projected into and identified with an object representation.

So we see that the issue of internal object bothered scholars throughout the ages. Is an internal object a breakdown of the ego somehow? Is the internal object connected to the manufacturing of meaning?

These suborganizations or subpersonalities or self-states, do they correspond to the representation of objects? Is everything internal objects? Is there nothing except internal objects?

There were many debates, and they were not resolved.

There was a psychologist Maria Torok. She wrote The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse, yes, was published in 1968 with a revision in 1994.

She said that what is interjected is not the object, but the ensemble of drives and their vicissitudes for which the object serves as an occasion or a mediator.

The goal here is to subjectify, tothe ego unconscious, anonymous or repressed drives such as the libido.

So TORO-R-O-K. Torok distinguished the internal object from the Imago.

The internal object represents one pawn in introjection.

The Imago represents everything that the ego appropriates through fantasies or through incorporation, bringing together everything that had resisted introjection.

An imago of fixation.

So in Togo's work, the Imago is a failed introjective relationship with an external object.

It acts to prohibit drives, to inhibit them.

Beyond the object, desire is lost, buried in what she called an endocryptic identification.

We're going to discuss the imago momentarily and make a distinction between the imago and the internal object, a distinction lost on many, many wannabe scholars and even real scholars.

But before we go there, we've been discussing ego, we've been discussing internal objects, introjects, and so and so forth, as if these were hand luggage, something you buy, a smartphone, a television set, a refrigerator.

No.

It's not that there's you and there's your ego. There's you and there's yourself. There's you and there's your internal objects.

These are not add-ons. These are not plug-ins.

The internal objects are who you are.

This is known as ego identity.

Ego identity is the experience of the self as a recognizable, persistent entity resulting from the integration of all the above mentioned internal objects, the ego ideal, roles in life, ways of adjusting to reality, cognition, emotions, affect, and so on.

There's a gradual acquisition of a sense of continuity and contiguity.

And it is the foundation of identity.

Sense of continuity critically depends on memories. Memories critically depend on internal objects. Internal objects critically depend on external objects.

When you have memories, memories critically depend on internal objects, internal objects critically depend on external objects.

When you have memories, you have an identity. When you have an identity, you have a sense of self-worth.

The kind of integration that Erik Erikson believed to be the essential process in personality development, and I encourage you to watch a video I've made about Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development.

In psychoanalytic theory, the ego ideal is the part of the ego that is the repository of positive identifications with parental goals, parental values and beliefs.

The individual genuinely admires, wishes to emulate and imitate the parents, mother and father.

And when the individual comes across, for example, honesty, mother is honest, father is loyal, they both have integrity, they serve as a model, they can serve as a role model for good, they can serve as a role model for bad, for evil.

But the child is impervious. The child imitates. The child imitates and emulates via the process of identification and introjection.

The child creates internal objects that represents mommy and daddy.

And these internal objects are imbued with the behaviors and traits and values and beliefs of mommy and daddy.

So if mommy and daddy are criminals, the child is likely, up to a certain stage in life, is likely to adopt these values and beliefs and methods of misconduct.

As new identifications are incorporated in later life, the ego ideal develops and changes, luckily for us.

Sigmund Freud incorporated the ego ideal into the concept of the superego, but that's probably a mistake because when the ego ideal is breached we experience shame, the shame of not living up to our internal standards and expectations.

When the superego is breached we experience guilt, the guilt of having acted wrongly, unethically and immorally.

The superego in psychoanalytic theory is the moral component of the personality that represents parental and societal standards.

The superego determines personal standards of right and wrong.

So it's just another word for conscience.

But the superego is also the seat, according to Freud's work, of aims and aspirations. In other words, it incorporates the ego ideal.

And of course, the superego is part of the ego. So it's the ego. The ego is an ego ideal part, a superego part, and so on and so forth.

And in Freud's work, at least initially and mistakenly, in my view, he identified, he conflated ego ideal with superego.

So the ego imposes rules, a superego imposes rules and principles and they stem from parental expectations demands prohibitions and injunctions.

The formation of the superego occurs on an unconscious level in the first five years of life and it continues throughout adulthood, childhood, adolescence and then adulthood.

Through identification with the parents and later with other models of behavior, other role models, which are admired or adulated or held in awe or even feared.

So it's an ongoing process. Interjection is an ongoing process.

And of course, the superego is an internal object. It's a highly complex internal object. It's a constellated internal object, but it's an internal object. It's a highly complex internal object. It's a constellated internal object, but it's an internal object because it includes mental representations of external objects, mother and father and later on in life are the role models.

One should not confuse the superego with a primitive superego. Primitive superego is what I call in my work an internalized bad object.

In object relations theory, the superego was first used in 1934 by British psychoanalyst James Strachey.

The primitive superego is a superego, which is very early in life, pre-verbal actually, super ego, pregenital in classic psychoanalytic theory.

And this primitive superego is the outcome of the interjection of especially harsh, terrifying, sadistic, rejecting, neglectful, abandoning, bad objects.

So when the external objects are emotionally dead, when the external objects are narcissistic, selfish, depressed, or depressing, emotionally withdrawn, avoidant, neglectful, rejecting, abandoning, hateful, abusive, traumatizing. When the external objects induce terror coupled with the dependency of the child on them, the child internalizes the judgments of the external objects in the form of a bad object.

So the child internalizes a bad object, and that's the primitive superego.

A primitive superego is an internal bad object that keeps informing the individual throughout life.

When the child is faced with a dead mother, a rejecting father, the child has two options.

The child can demonize the parental figures. The child can say, I have a bad mother, I have a bad father.

But that's terrifying to admit that your mother is bad or your father is evil is life-threatening.

So instead of doing this, the child splits the parental figures and adopts the bad object the child says I am bad I am bad I'm being punished I'm being ignored I'm being abandoned I'm being rejected because I'm bad because I'm inadequate because I'm unworthy because I'm unlovable because I'm stupid because I'm evil because I'm wicked that's why my parents don't love me don't care for me and this is the primitive super ego.

Now to the imago.

The imago is a huge model because it's been confused, even by its own creators, it's been confused with complexes in Jungian theory. It's been conflated with other concepts such as archetypes, again in Jungian theory. So it became a huge mess. It's been appropriated by object relation schools, even by Freud, and everyone gave it their own interpretation and today it's such a mess that it even misleads scholars even scholars are misled and use the concept of imago wrongly misidentifying it with interjection interject eternal objects, and so and so forth.

Now, an imago is an unconscious prototype of a person.

The imago determines the way in which you apprehend others, in which you perceive others.

Because the imago is like a template. Imago is like a template. It's like a general blueprint on how to relate to other people.

When you want to interact with someone, you revert to your imago. You go to the imago and say, how should I interact with human beings?

There is this character. There is this beautiful woman. There is this man I want as a friend. There is this, you know, and I want to interact with them. What's your advice? How to do that?

And there is an unconscious prototype of a human being. And the imago tells you how to perceive that human being.

Imago is a consequence of very early real and fantastic intersubjective relations with family members, most notably again, mother and later father.

So the imago was first described in the work of Carl Jung in 1912 and then it was borrowed by Freud and Jung himself then changed his mind and he said actually the imago is the complex and then he changed his mind again in the 30s and said no the imago is not the complex and everyone agreed that the imago is somehow linked to repression in neurosis through regression, the imago provokes the return of an old relationship or form of relationship, the reanimation of parental representations.

So it's a unique aspect of the unconscious. The imago is kind of the archaeology of the initial relationships you have had with mother and father, the first ones, first human beings in your life.

When I say mother, maternal figure, yes.

So these initial relationships, when you were one month, six months old, two years old, these initial relationships got buried. They became archaeological layers strata in some excavation.

And the imago is the repository or the trigger to these archaeological layers.

In 1933, Jung said, this intrapsychical image, the imago, comes from two sources, the influence of the parents on the one hand and the child's specific relations on the other.

It is thus an image that only reproduces its model in an extremely conventional way.

He situated the imago, as he said, between the unconscious and consciousness, in a sense, as if in kiosko.

So the imago is autonomous. The imago is partially a complex because it's in the unconscious. And it's not fully integrated with consciousness.

Freud himself used the imago in the Jungian sense in more or less the same year, 1912, a few months before Freud's.

And he wrote in the dynamics of transference, if the father imago, to use the apt term introduced by Jung, is the decisive factor in bringing this about, the outcome will tally with the real relations of the subject to his therapist, to his doctor.

So these were the rudiments of transference, the imago has been interpreted in a variety of ways, trying to, people were trying to understand, scholars were trying to understand what does it mean to gain access through the imago to theshape, to the form, to the structure, into the function and to the content of very very very old, the first relationships in one's life, initially with mother.

What does it mean this access, is it for example erotic fixation, is it related to the real traits of primary object, real observations about mother and father, or is it totally fantastic?

Does it have to do with the objects themselves, with mother herself, or does it have to do more with the relationship itself?

Not so much with mother, but with the way the child interacted, with the way the child had felt about mother, the way the child had experienced mother.

So which is it, is the imago in other words the encapsulation and capturing of dynamic processes, or is it static, exactly like a photograph? And if it is static, how can we mine it? How can we access it? It needs to be dynamic in order to interact with our consciousness or even with our unconscious. There needs to be a dynamic element.

The child links with the parents, they're the most important thing, the way the child subjectively perceives the parents. This is inherent in the modern concept of the imago.

Freud suggested that some representations, some internal objects have the status of imago and some don't, and I will not go into all of this.

But in the 1920s, many, many scholars, Sandor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud, Jung, others as you will see, many of them reach the conclusion that the imago and more generally internal objects represent aggression, sadism. Most internal objects are self-destructive, are threatening, are ominous. They're spliced off and they're split off and they're buried and they're repressed because they contain a nucleus of potential trauma.

In the economic problem of masochism, Freud used the term imago in the Jungian sense in relation to moral masochism and the emergence of the superego. Jung did the same. He also considered the imago as having something to do with the sadistic injunctions or the injunctions of a sadistic superego and some kind of moral self-flagellation and self-torture, masochism.

He wrote that behind the power, Freud wrote, that behind the power exerted by the first objects of the libidinal instincts, in other words, behind the power exerted by the first objects of the libidinal instincts, in other words, behind the power exerted by the parents, there's the hidden influence of the past, traditions, society, culture, the figure of destiny, the last figure in a series that begins with the parents.

And this is all integrated into the agency of the superego, as if the superego was something impersonal. But in fact, it's directly connected all the time to the internal objects which represent the parents, possibly parental imagos.

Melanie Klein definitely is identified with the concept of the imago. Besides the classic imagoes, Klein described what she called combined parental imagoes. And she said that combined parental imagoes provoke the most terrible states of anxiety.

So she also considered internal objects as negative, as aggressive, as self-defeating, as self-destructive. She said that imagoes are linked to the stage of the apogee of sadism, the apex of sadism.

And in 1946, she coined the phrase the schizoid paranoid position to describe the emergence of internal objects in the process of introjection.

In Klein's view, the young child develops cruel, aggressive fantasies about the parents. The child then projects these fantasies onto the parents and comes to believe that they're cruel, they're sadistic. The child develops a distorted, unreal and dangerous image of people. The child then interjects this image and it becomes the early superego.

Klein described the early superego more as an imago than as an agency or even an introject.

So again we come full circle to the narcissist. When the narcissist creates an introject in your mind, this introject automatically is associated with cruelty, with sadism, aggression, with criticism, with censorship, with hatred, with negative affects.

Susan Isaacs defined what she meant by imago. She said that an image or imago is what is interjected during the process of interjection.

So Susan Isaacs melded, combined, coalesced introjection and introjects with imago. She saidit's one of the same. There's a complex phenomenon and interjects with imago. She said it's one of the same. There's a complex phenomenon and it starts with a concrete external object. And then this concrete external object is taken into the self. It becomes an internal object.

Isaac's seminal book, The Nature and Function of Fantasy, with PH, in 1948, and she wrote,

In psychoanalytic thought, we have heard more of Imago than of image.

The distinctions between an Imago and image might be summarized as,

A, Imago refers to an unconscious image.

B, Imago usually refers to a person or part of a person, the earliest objects, part objects, whilst image may be of any object or situation, human or otherwise.

And C, Imago includes all the somatic and emotional elements in the subject's relation to the imaged person. The bodily links in unconscious fantasy with the id, the fantasy of incorporation which underlies the process of interjection.

So according to Isaacs, the introject, as I said, when I started this video, when we were all much, much younger, the introject is not only a representation of the external object, definitely not a photograph, audio recording, or any of video recording, or any of that nonsense spewed online.

Intraject, I will read to you again, her definition of the introject, which she conflates with Imago.

She says Imago is just another name for an introject, for an internal object.

She says, it includes all the somatic and emotional elements in the subject's relation to the imaged person, to the external object. The bodily links in unconscious fantasy with the id, the fantasy of incorporation which underlies the process of interjection.

Whereas in the image, the somatic and much of the emotional elements are largely repressed.

There's a forgotten article in 1938 titled the complex familiar in the Formation of the Individuals, the Family Complexes and the Formation of the Individual. It was authored by who else, Jacques Lacan.

Lacan drew a connection between the imago and the complex, in the wake and in the footsteps of Carl Jung. And he advanced that stage his theory of the imaginary.

So, Lacan's theory of imaginary, which deserves a video of its own, has a lot to do with interjection and internal objects.

Lacan said that the Imago is the constitutive element of the complex. The complex makes it possible to understand the structure of a family institution, caught between the cultural dimension that determines it, and the imaginary links that organize it.

Lacan described three stages. He said, there's the winning complex, the intrusion complex in which the mirror stages describe, and the Oedipus complex.

And this complex imago structure prefigures what would become the topology of the real, imaginary, and symbolic.

But again, we're not going to all this.

A very important imago, a very important internal object is known as the idealized parental imago. It's a narcissistic configuration. It arises from the child's attribution of former lost narcissistic perfection to an admired and omnipotent self-object.

So the idealized parental imago is when the child transitions from self-idealization, the belief in narcissistic perfection.

And what the child does, he doesn't want to get rid of this narcissism. He doesn't want to get rid of this grandiosity, this sense of perfection.

So it imbues it, it imbues the parents. It imbues the internal objects that represent the parents with this perfection.

The child creates internal objects that represent mommy and daddy. And then the child says these internal objects, these mommy and daddy.

And then the child says, these internal objects, these self objects, they are perfect. They are godlike.

But these are self objects, of course. They're internal, but they're also an integral part of the self.

So the idealized parental imago has a lot to do with the ego ideal. It can be the object of fixation, and it is integrated in the self in order to lead to ideals and idealistic thinking but it can remain and in cases of fixation in cases of pathology it does remain a concrete self object distinct from the self.

This is the case in narcissism, in pathological narcissism, where thenot been integrated into the self, because there's no self.

And they remain inside the narcissists, these internal objects, remain inside the narcissists, they are remain inside the narcissists they're perfect they're godlike they're idealized but they're also harsh they're also sadistic they're also aggressive and they're also cruel.

The narcissist has to gratify them. Initially, the narcissist gratifies them by sacrificing the true self.

And then later on, the narcissist tries to gratify these internalized parental imagos by performing for them, accomplishing things. And then the narcissist creates fantasies of grandiosity.

And finally, in order to placate these internal gods, cruel, unrelenting, callous gods, the narcissist sacrifices you, everyone around him, within a shared fantasy.

Heinz Kohut wrote an article, Forms and Transformations of Narcissism in 1966 and then incorporated it in his book, Analysis of the Self in 1971.

He said that the idealized parental imago accounts for the need to merge with an all-powerful object and for religious and idealistic feelings of varying degrees of intensity.

He said that these parental imagoes, which are perfect, godlike idealize, give rise to an idealizing transference in therapy in analysis.

Few years later, in 1977, he wrote a book in the title, The Restoration of the Self.

He perceived of imagoes or internal objects as a pole of the self, possibilities, potentials of the self.

And the self acquires its cohesion by responses of the self objects that promote a sense of merging and calm, what Freud called the oceanic feeling.

The self will be fragile only if both poles fail the function.

In the case of narcissism, of course, this dynamic is huge, is fundamental.

Okay. There's a big debate about Kohut's work. Is narcissism an independent line of development? Is narcissism natural and just undergoes cancerous transformation later in life into pathological narcissism etc it's a huge debate I will not go into all of this.

One last comment about empathy.

Empathy is not possible without introjection. Internal objects are crucial to empathy.

The ability to create internal objects, the ability to maintain them, the ability to invest in them emotionally, the ability to interact and have relationships with internal objects, but above all, the ability to tell the difference between internal objects and external objects, the ability to recognize the separateness and externality and autonomy and independence of external objects.

Roland Barthes says that empathy is a word that is compromised by sociology. He says that it's the consciousness of the social other.

Barthes said we should return to a more psychoanalytic sense empathic coalescence with internal objects so he borrowed it from Jean Guillement the concept of empathy is very close to a concept of unison in the work of these thinkers but they emphasize the role of internal objects.

Now historically, as you know, the word empathy ironically was coined by a German and it was used to describe the aesthetic reaction to works of art. It was called Einfühlung. Communion, affective communion or something like that.

And so empathy is defined as a specific psychical process.

We conceive of someone else's psyche, more or less directly, as our own experience. We appropriate someone else's experience, someone else's being, someone else's existence, someone else's soul. We appropriate it, we internalize it, we interject it, we convert it into an internal object.

This is the precondition for empathy.

Empathy is just another word for identification in effect.

According to Winterstein, or Winterstein, depending on the period, in 1931, the process of empathy takes place in such a way that the id, in some way or another, realizes the condition of the other.

This primitive part of you, the instincts, the drives, resonates with the same primitive part in parts in other people, identifies with other people on the basis of equal emotional preparedness or equivalent instinctual attitude. So it's closely related to instincts.

If we take it a step further, we may say that empathy is instinctual.

Because empathy is a private case of identification and introjection, perhaps we could say, we could generalize and say that introjection and identification and incorporation and all these are actually instinctual manifestations.

Now this would be revolutionary because in Freud's work and everyone that followed Freud, instincts are dangerous. Instincts are repressed, controlled, diverted, channeled by the ego, including the superego. So if introjection and internalization are instinct, are instinctual in nature, that would imply that they negate the ego.

And we are coming back full circle to Fairburn, who said that whenever we create an internal object, we fragment the ego, we split off the ego.

It seems that some thinkers are leading to the conclusion that ego functions and ego processes are inimical, they're hostile to introjection and identification.

And yet the ego itself, definitely the superego, is the outcome of identification and introjection.

This is a conundrum. Is the ego being territorial, like identification, interjection, mission accomplished, end of story. I don't want any other intrusions into the psyche.

It's one possibility.

The other possibility is that constant introjection identification is a threat to equilibrium or homeostasis or stability of the personality, reality testing, other ego functions? I don't know. But these are intriguing thoughts.

Once the Eid in Winterstein's work, once the Eid recognizes another person's Eid, once the Eid's resonate, once the primitive parts resonate, equivalent affective impulses are mobilized.

In other words, this provokes emotions. Emotions that reflect the emotions in the other person, related dispositions of feeling are experienced and made conscious to the ego as inner perception, so that they are converted into the impulses of movement that are inherent in them.

So this is the sequence.

Initially we resonate with each other primitively, then we resonate with each other emotionally.

This becomes conscious, the ego takes over, mobilizes us, causes movement or motion.

In all this process, the only way to resonate with another person is to generate an internal object that represents that other person in our minds and is experienced as internal.

That's why empathy is an internal experience, not an external one. It's not the same as observation, which psychopaths and narcissists are capable of, and cold empathy.

So what is foreign to the psyche is by virtue of identification, experienced to a certain extent in empathy as belonging to one's own psyche, especially since the auto-innovations in the empathic process are sensed as being very close to the ego, according to Winterstein.

This whole brings up the question of intersubjectivity, with which I will conclude.

Intersubjectivity is mistaken very often, again. People think that it refers to the interaction between two separate individuals or two separate sentient beings.

But intersubjectivity is not the interaction, is not the perception of the other. It's not the communication with the other. It's not making an agreement with the other.

Intersubjectivity is the space common to two entities, to two human beings. The intermediate area of space between two people, in between.

That's why it's intersubjective, between two subjects.

You could reach an intersubjective agreement. You could use this space to yield common ground, but it is the space, not the individuals, and not the interaction between the individuals.

There are psychic elements which cannot develop exclusively in one's head without the participation of the other.

According to Lacanian thought, all the unconscious is the internalization of the other.

But even in more minimal versions, some things can be born, for example, language, only among individuals.

Intersubjectivity refers to the subject's social constitution. Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others wrote about this.

Being in each other. Interconnection, binding, which is initially concrete, sensorial, and only later is followed by ideas.

And this, what makes us human, this intersubjective space, whenever we meet another person we create this common ground, and we share it, and we tread upon it by mutual consent, this interaction.

And then having established a common ground we feel safe enough, the common ground is a secure base which is safe enough to interject the other person.

And once the other person is interject inside our minds then we have an internal object, a representation of that other person.

And then we continue with a dual interaction externally and internally, except if we are narcissists.

If we are narcissists, the interaction is completely internal and in a way, solipsistic.

I've done my best to elucidate these concepts for the benefit of self-starved experts, wannabe experts, future experts, and their dogs and mothers-in-law. And I hope I haven't bored you out of your minds and I hope my introject has been quiescent throughout this lecture and if not just switch it off what's a big deal.