ABSTRACT
In the early years of psychoanalysis, particularly because of the influence of Karl Abraham, there was a tendency to consider processes of internalization and externalization in concrete terms such as "taking in" or "putting into the other person." A specific direction of development pertinent to the ideas we are considering is that taken by ego psychology, greatly influenced by the postwar work of Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Rudolph Loewenstein, Edith Jacobson, and others. Melanie Klein's conception of mental processes as being intimately related to fantasies contributed to her view of the close relation between projection and anal fantasies of expulsion. In 1939, in Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, Heinz Hartmann extended Freud's conceptualizations of internalization to take into account a developmental process whereby the individual becomes increasingly independent of his environment. In the process of internalization the person adopts as his own certain behavior which previously appeared only as a direct reaction to environmental stimulation.
