Editing Introjection (section)

==Historic precursors==
===Freud and Klein===
In Freudian terms, introjection is the aspect of the ego's system of relational mechanisms which handles checks and balances from a perspective external to what one normally considers 'oneself', infolding these inputs into the internal world of the self-definitions, where they can be weighed and balanced against one's various senses of externality. For example:
* "When a child envelops representational images of his absent parents into himself, simultaneously fusing them with his own personality." 
* "Individuals with weak ego [[Personal boundaries|boundaries]] are more prone to use introjection as a defense mechanism."
According to [[D. W. Winnicott]], "projection and introjection mechanisms... let the other person be the manager sometimes, and to hand over [[omnipotence]]."<ref>"Winnicott, D.W. ''Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst''. New York, London: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1986. 50.</ref>

According to Freud, the [[Id, ego and super-ego#Ego|ego]] and the [[superego]] are constructed by introjecting external behavioural patterns into the subject's own person. Specifically, he maintained that the critical agency or the superego could be accounted for in terms of introjection and that the superego derives from the parents or other figures of authority.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book|title=Sigmund Freud|last=Wollheim|first=Richard|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=1981|isbn=052128385X|location=Cambridge|pages=223}}</ref> The derived behavioural patterns are not necessarily reproductions as they actually are but incorporated or introjected versions of them.<ref name=":1" />

===Torok and Ferenczi===
However, the aforementioned description of introjection has been challenged by [[Maria Torok]] as she favours using the term as it is employed by [[Sándor Ferenczi]] in his essay "The Meaning of Introjection" (1912). In this context, introjection is an extension of autoerotic interests that broadens the ego by a lifting of repression so that it includes external objects in its make-up. Torok defends this meaning in her 1968 essay "The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse", where she argues that [[Sigmund Freud]] and [[Melanie Klein]] confuse introjection with incorporation and that Ferenczi's definition remains crucial to analysis. She emphasized that in failed [[mourning]] "the impotence of the process of introjection (gradual, slow, laborious, mediated, effective)" means that "incorporation is the only choice: fantasmatic, unmediated, instantaneous, magical, sometimes hallucinatory...'crypt' effects (of incorporation)".<ref>Jacques Derrida, "Foreword", Nicolas Abraham/Maria Torok, ''The Wolf Man's Secret Word'' (1986) p. xvii and p. 119n</ref>

===Fritz and Laura Perls===
In [[Gestalt therapy]], the concept of "introjection" is not identical with the psychoanalytical concept. Central to [[Fritz Perls|Fritz]] and [[Laura Perls]]' modifications was the concept of "dental or oral aggression", when the infant develops teeth and is able to chew. They set "introjection" against "assimilation". In ''Ego, Hunger and Aggression'',<ref>Perls, F., ''Ego, Hunger and Aggression'' (1942, 1947) {{ISBN|0-939266-18-0}}</ref> Fritz and Laura Perls suggested that when the infant develops teeth, he or she has the capacity to chew, to break apart food, and assimilate it, in contrast to swallowing before; and by analogy to experience, to taste, accept, reject or assimilate.
Laura Perls explains: "I think Freud said that development takes place through introjection, but if it remains introjection and goes no further, then it becomes a block; it becomes identification."<ref>Wysong, J./Rosenfeld, E.(eds.): ''An oral history of Gestalt therapy. Interviews with Laura Perls, Isadore From, Erving Polster, [[Miriam Polster]]'', Highland, N.Y. 1982, p. 6.</ref>

Thus Fritz and Laura Perls made "assimilation", as opposed to "introjection", a focal theme in Gestalt therapy and in their work, and the prime means by which growth occurs in therapy. In contrast to the psychoanalytic stance, in which the "patient" introjects the (presumably more healthy) interpretations of the analyst, in Gestalt therapy the client must "taste" with awareness their experience, and either accept or reject it, but not introject or "swallow whole". Hence, the emphasis is on avoiding interpretation, and instead encouraging discovery. This is the key point in the divergence of Gestalt therapy from traditional psychoanalysis: growth occurs through gradual assimilation of experience in a natural way, rather than by accepting the interpretations of the analyst.