ABSTRACT
This chapter on the work of the American analyst Hans Loewald explores a different Freudian legacy. In a striking metaphorical passage, Loewald portrays the homuncular entities occupying the psychic inner world as unlaid ghosts who have been buried too shallowly and mourned insufficiently. For the sake of psychic emancipation, and for the ghosts to be turned into ancestors, the agency-building processes of metabolic internalization must ultimately prevail over the entrapments of both repression and identification. Two of Loewald’s papers on internalization are investigated in detail, drawing out his thoughtful, sophisticated re-renderings of Freudian theory and terminology. Though his work is associated with the ego-psychology school that dominated American psychoanalysis for decades, Loewald’s subtle mind ranges more widely and deeply, providing a persuasive account of how a successful mourning process might free the mind in optative, future-oriented ways. Poetic corroboration of these ideas and attitudes is introduced into the chapter by the work of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens.
