Correlative Aspects of Introjective and Projective Mechanisms
W. W. MEISSNER S.J., M.D.1
1 Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Faculty Member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and Staff Psychiatrist, Massachusetts Mental Health Center and the Cambridge Hospital
The author discusses the correlative nature of projection and introjection, their early roles in development and differentiation, and their later defensive uses. He describes how, in paranoid states, the interplay between projecting and introjecting leads to conflicted ambivalence between preserving and annihilating significant objects.
