Problems of Internalization: a button Is a button Is—Not

Gertrude Stein’s famous quotation, a “rose is a rose is a rose” (1913, p. 90), was meant to convey that things are simply what they are. In this paper, I am interested in the moment(s) when a thing can become more than a thing and becomes imbued with feeling and meaning.

Abstract

Analysts hope to help the patient internalize a relationship with the analyst that contrasts with the original archaic object relation. In this paper, the author describes particular difficulties in working with a patient whose defenses and anxieties were bulimic, her movement toward internalization inevitably undone. Several issues are considered: how does the nonsymbolizing patient come to internalize the analyst’s understanding, and when this does not hold, what is the nature of the patient’s subsequent methods of dispersal? When the patient can maintain connection to the analyst as a good object, even fleetingly, in the depressive position, the possibility of internalization and symbolic communication is increased.

• Sensory experience
• autistic defense
• adhesive skin identification
• good object
• internalization
• analytic relationship
• symbolization
• internal objects
• introjection
• Kleinian theory
• bulimia
• transference
• containment

Notes

Gertrude Stein’s famous quotation, a “rose is a rose is a rose” (1913, p. 90), was meant to convey that things are simply what they are. In this paper, I am interested in the moment(s) when a thing can become more than a thing and becomes imbued with feeling and meaning.