ABSTRACT
In ‘Three essays on the theory of sexuality’ Sigmund Freud (1905d) referred to the experience of sucking as an essential gratification tied to the oral zone and linked with nutrition. Although Freud (1887–1902) mentioned “identification” in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, it was in Three Essays that he wrote about the sexual aim of the oral phase (oral incorporation of the object) which became a prototype of identification. Adapting the terms “introject” and “introjections” from Sándor Ferenczi (1909), Freud applied them to the analysis of mourning and melancholia (Freud, 1917e), which signalled the beginnings of the concept of internalised object images. Mourning refers to an obligatory preoccupation with the internalised images of a dead person or lost thing. The Kleinian school should receive the credit for carrying the study of object relatedness and the internalisation of objects—at the outset, part of objects—back to the beginnings of life experiences. As Otto Kernberg’s (1969) review of the Kleinian formulations also shows, this school influenced what was then the mainstream of psychoanalysis to focus further on the earliest level of relatedness. Internalisation–externalisation of self- and object images (accompanied by introjection and projections of affects and thoughts as the infant and child grow up), the earliest type of relatedness for everyone, inevitably 90reappears prominently in the process of treating persons like Attis. This was noticed long ago by many analysts (for example see: Searles, 1951; Hoedemaker, 1955; Limentani, 1956; Szasz, 1957; Abse & Ewing, 1960; Cameron, 1961; Boyer, 1967).
