ABSTRACT
Extractive introjection occurs when one person steals for a certain period of time an element of another individual's psychic life. This chapter explores how extractive introjection which is maintained alters the intrasubjective function of a psychic element. The victim could radically dissociate himself from the element of criticism because its function is to isolate him from the family world. It differentiates between four types of extractive introjection: the theft of mental content, the theft of the affective process, the theft of mental structure, and the theft of self. The person who has consistently had important elements of his psyche extracted during childhood will experience a certain kind of loss. The chapter distinguishes the paranoia that develops as a result of parental extractions of the child's psyche from the dynamically projective paranoia by examining the nature of the transference and the countertransference. The analysand whose paranoia is a form of anguished grief seeks a repatriation with the elements of the psyche.
