ABSTRACT
Introjection belongs to a family of terms that includes identification and incorporation, the three of them falling under the general heading of internalization. Of these, only incorporation refers directly to the unconscious fantasy of taking into the bodily self something perceived as existing outside that self. When blocked incorporation figures importantly in the analyses and emotional life, it will control his or her development of transference and attempted manipulations of countertransference. Interpreting unconscious fantasies of incorporation, achieved or blocked, is a subtle, often seemingly contradictory enterprise. The alternative of making too much order among unconscious fantasies is most likely to support intellectualization and the analyses and idealization of the analyst as omniscient or omnipotent. The conception of unconscious fantasy as fluid, non-Euclidean, illogical, fragmented, and concretistic, which should be an essential part of every analyst's equipment, is never more needed than in working out the vicissitudes of anti-incorporative strategies.
