ABSTRACT
This Introduction first considers whether these familiar psychoanalytic topics merit revisiting at all but then argues that central concepts like internalization, identification, introjection, and incorporation have traditionally been confused. A detailed exploration of the use of these concepts by key psychoanalytic theorists aims to interrogate and clarify their similarities and differences. It is suggested that a serious (and playful) exploration of the metaphor of psychic digestion or metabolization might enhance these intentions and consolidate the metapsychological links between mourning and the internal world. The methodology of the book, borrowed from literary criticism, consists of detailed close readings of psychoanalytic writings by Freud, Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Klein, Loewald, Nicolas Abraham, Torok, and Green. Further reinforcing the nature of the book, these themes are not exemplified clinically but by way of literature: a short story (by William Faulkner) which is referenced throughout the book, and several poems (by Wordsworth, Shelley, Stevens, Auden, and Plath), which are also read closely in the chapters that follow. Approaching the psychoanalytic internal world from this perhaps unusual angle suggests that the book itself is a metabolic product, integrating and assimilating the concerns of the author’s two careers.
