ABSTRACT
Devoted to texts by Freud’s two most important disciples, this chapter provides a bridge to the work of Melanie Klein who was analysed by both. It first explores two early papers by Sándor Ferenczi in which he invents and must then defend and further explain the essential but much-misunderstood notion of introjection. Intending to denote a psychic (or even metabolic) process whereby an ego or subject encounters and takes in the outside world and its objects, Ferenczi strove to maintain a clear distance between his concept and some of the more literal, concrete, or zonally based ideas about internalization that were beginning to circulate within psychoanalysis at the time. In the second part of the chapter, Karl Abraham’s invaluable contributions are assessed. His first paper on manic-depressed patients preceded and pre-empted “Mourning and Melancholia” by several years, and a far more comprehensive later monograph took in and elaborated upon much of what Freud wrote on these subjects. Given his wealth of experience with patients suffering from depressive ailments, he brought richness of detail to both his clinical accounts and his elaboration of the psycho-sexual stages, attributing special prominence to the anal-evacuative as well as oral-incorporative attributes of the melancholic psyche.
