ABSTRACT
This chapter describes introjection as an extension to the external world of the original autoerotic interests, by including its objects in the ego. It explains the excessive proneness to transference of neurotics as unconscious exaggeration of the same mechanism, that is, as addiction to introjection, while paranoiacs tend to withdraw their love from the objects and, after its recovery therefrom, to project it again into the external world. In any case projection in paranoia and introjection in neurosis play so much more important a role than all the other mechanisms that psychoanalysts can regard them as characteristic of these clinical entities. The chapter aims to stick in the future to the notion of introjection which well describes all their past experiences. Dr. A. Maeder’s ‘exteriorization’ is therefore not a process of projection, but of introjection. In Maeder’s exteriorization the interest is only displaced from one object in the external world on to another similar one.
