ABSTRACT
“Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” exemplifies Loewald’s exegetical relation to Freud (here, especially, to “Mourning and Melancholia”) and his integration of Freud’s ego-structural and object relations theories. In so doing, it describes Loewald’s views of development in infancy and childhood and in analysis. In turn, this chapter exemplifies my own exegetical relation to Loewald. I show how Loewald describes in detail the intrapsychic and structure-creating internalizations and differentiation, the structuralizations, that form ego and superego. These begin in childhood and are brought up again in the processes of termination in psychoanalysis. For Loewald, internalization and differentiation are among the primary activities of the psyche. Intersubjective ego psychology addresses these psychic processes of ego development and change that occur in subject-subject relational and developmental contexts.
In describing the processes of internalization and differentiation, Loewald’s paper echoes other writings in which he seems to mourn the loss of the “magical” powers and “magical” communication in mother-child oneness and of the density and saturation that characterize primary mental process. In this context, he presents a critique of hyper-scientific rationalism. This focus on the loss of magic echoes the sociologist Max Weber’s characterization of modern rationalization’s “disenchantment of the world.”
