Introjection and Projection are powerful tools against unsuspecting victims, and may seem less real, and thus less important if left unidentified. Naming these tactics can help to negate their power, and expose them as a charlatan's trick.
Introjection
Introjection occurs where a subject takes into itself the behaviors, attributes or other external objects, especially of other people.
A common pattern is where a child introjects aspects of parents into its own persona.
According to Freud, the ego and the superego are constructed by introjecting external behavior into the subject's own persona.
This can be a defense mechanism where one takes on attributes of a strong other person who is able to cope with the current threat. It is based on an unconscious phantasy of ingestion.
Introjection is not as primitive as incorporation, as it often involved drawing an object in, but not incorporating it into the body. An introjected object is drawn into the 'inner circle', but can still have a life of its own.
Introjective identification is the taking in of someone else's good objects. This occurs with people we like or admire.
Introjection is thus 'input' into the internal world from the outer world.
Incorporation is derived from the Latin incorporare, meaning ‘to form into a body'. It is perhaps the most basic form of taking the outside world into the inner world, being focused on bodily sensation and ingestion.
Although this need not mean actual bodily ingestion, this term is used to explain the way that incorporation is experienced and conceived. By bringing something into the body, I make it undeniably a part of the physical, solid and real me. Once incorporated, it cannot be separated from me, but I can choose what to do with it, including destroying or expelling it. ... Freud used incorporation to refer to a primitive wish to unite with or cannibalistically destroy an object.
Thank you, tt... I'm still not sure where I'm going with this; only that I feel it's really important. It's one of those things that I have to let settle around me and see how it "fits"... and whether it "fits".
GOD... I just had an AWFUL thought: OK, more than one... really quickly, so that it seemed like one thought...PLEASE don't think I'm crazy...
for some time, I've felt like I am reliving Twiggy's year - the one with all the trauma in it... including the "shunning" phase... and the final "putting Twiggy in the box". Anniversary dates are flashing by; my aunt who helped me so much died in June '69... the July 4, 1969 flood, Woodstock - 8-15-69... and of course, around this week or perhaps next week, I would've started school and the "deed" had been done to Twiggy. Chronology has been immensely important to me throughout all the healing process, because the dissociation I suffered got things all mixed up in order. July/August would've been the time I split all of my emotions off - put Twiggy in the box.
I just had the most intense emotional experience last week; grieving for an old friend who died last year. We were laughing at video of his standup comedy - he was totally hilarious in a "not politically correct" way. We were reminiscing - and I suppose grieving all the life and losses of the last 40 years between us. He was married to my best friend... I've known her since the 7th grade; met her in fact, around this time in 1969. We spent the evening diving into all kinds of emotional past history with each other... and my cigarettes "magically" didn't get smoked. I had almost a full pack the next morning. (Hops - take note! there might be something to my theory about emotions/smoking and SAFETY...)
I spoke to my brother last night, and he brought up the fact that he may be separating from his wife sooner rather than later. I begged him to take his kids with him. He told me the details... of what my mother had referred to, when I started this thread... he had pulled out old video/home movies of my niece who was clowning around and being silly in the shower. Everyone was laughing, but my nephew couldn't contain himself - he got the giggles and couldn't stop. It's one of the true joys of being alive at any age, right? Well, that just set my SIL off - and she started spanking him, telling him stop-stop-stop... that he was being mean; there was nothing funny about laughing at someone like that... he shouldn't be laughing at ALL... it was insulting - i.e., it was insulting HER. Poor kid had no idea what he did, that was so wrong - everyone else, except her - was laughing.
This is what my mother was referring to; that was "so wrong"... that the kid would start to blame himself 'coz his mother has issues. Like my mother - 40 years ago - with me.
I have this really bizarre sense of watching - from the outside - what happened to me 40 years ago, happen all over again. I don't like it...(hell, it's starting to trigger something) but I also don't feel like I'm completely in control of it. Something in me IS getting fixed, but I don't know what. I keep reminding myself... that there is a boundary I can't cross... it's my brother's family situation; not mine... but I keep feeling prompted into action... responsibility...
... but it's all in some subtexted, subliminal, underlying blender of "coincidence", "synchronicity", and emotion. And what - besides the usual innocent victim role she assumes - is my mother's part in that whole scenario?? In creating the situation. Even my brother remarked how he felt like my Dad who lived with constant, all-out war between his wife and his mother... repetition AGAIN... and I told him to get the kids away where they could be themselves, without fear... and to stop working so much and just spend time with the kids.
OK, before this blows into a complete panic attack... I'm going to let it go for the time being. That thing that seems to be triggered & looming over me, is the sense of "foreboding doom" that Twiggy had 40 years ago, that presaged her disappearance until a couple years ago. I just hope that this is pure speculative fear... and that there isn't something more in these odd coincidences and repetitions - in the pattern - that I should be more conscious of and am decidedly not, right now.
I think I'm just plain old spooked by the similarities.
