VOLUME 1. Mobilizing the Self

Part 2. Manipulating the Self

VII. Introjection

Experiment 15: Introjecting and Eating

In dealing with introjects we again make use of the same techniques of concentration and development which were applied to retroflections, but there is a crucial difference in procedure. In retroflections both the retroflected act and the behavior which it holds in check are parts of one’s own personality, and what must be done is, first, to accept and identify with both parts, and, second, to find a new integration in which both parts obtain overt expression. An introject, on the other hand, consists of material—a way of acting, feeling, evaluating—which you have taken into your system of behavior, but which you have not assimilated in such fashion as to make it a genuine part of your organism. You took it in on the basis of a forced acceptance, a forced (and therefore pseudo) identification, so that, even though you will now resist its dislodgment as if it were something precious, it is actually a foreign body.

Both as an organism and as a personality one grows by assimilating new material. To compare the acquisition of habits, attitudes, beliefs, or ideals to the process of taking physical food into the organism strikes one at first as merely a crude analogy, but the more one examines the detailed sequence of each, the more one realizes their functional identity.

Physical food, properly digested and assimilated, becomes part of the organism; but food which “rests heavy on the stomach" is an introject. You are aware of it and want to throw it up. If you do so, you get it “out of your system.” Suppose, instead, you suppress your discomfort, nausea and tendency to spew it forth. Then you “keep it down” and either succeed finally in painfully digesting it or else it poisons you.

When it is not physical food but concepts, “facts,” or standards of behavior, the situation is the same. A theory which you have mastered—digested in detail so that you have made it yours—can be used flexibly and efficiently because it has become “second nature” to you. But some “lesson” which you have swallowed whole without comprehension—for example, “on authority”—and which you now use “as if” it were your own, is an introject. Though you have suppressed your initial bewilderment over what was forced into you, you cannot really use such foreign knowledge and, to the extent that you have cluttered your personality with gulped-down morsels of this and that, you have impaired your ability to think and act on your own.

On this point we differ with Freud. He held that some introjections are healthy; for instance, the models and imitations by which the developing personality of the child is formed—especially the introjection of the loving parents. But in this he was obviously failing to make the distinction between introjection and assimilation. What is assimilated is not taken in as a whole, but is first destroyed (de-structured) completely and transformed—and absorbed selectively according to the need of the organism. Whatever the child gets from his loving parents he assimilates, for it is fitting and appropriate to his own needs as he grows. It is the hateful parents who have to be introjected, taken down whole, although they are contrary to the needs of the organism. Accompanying this is the starving of the child’s proper needs and his repressing of rebellion and disgust. The “I" which is composed of introjects does not function spontaneously, for it is made up of concepts about the self— duties, standards, and views of “human nature” imposed from the outside.

If you can realize the necessity for an aggressive, destructive, and reconstructive attitude toward any experience that you are really to make your own, you can then appreciate the need mentioned previously to evaluate aggressions highly and nor to dub them glibly “anti-social”—on the basis of an introject. As commonly used, “social” often means being willing to introject norms, codes and institutions which are foreign to man’s healthy interests and needs, and in the process to lose genuine community and the ability to experience joy.

To eliminate introjects from your personality the problem is not, as it was with retroflections, to accept and integrate dissociated parts of yourself. Rather, it is to become aware of what is not truly yours, to acquire a selective and critical attitude toward what is offered you, and, above all, to develop the ability to “bite off” and “chew” experience so as to extract its healthy nourishment.

To clarify further the process of introjection, let us review the earliest years of life. The foetus is in complete confluence with the mother, who provides oxygen, food, and environment. After birth the infant must get his own air and begin to differentiate the sensory environment, but his food, although now only intermittently available, still comes fully prepared for digestion. All that is required of him is to suck and swallow. Such fluid intake is equivalent to total introjection, for the material is swallowed whole. But this is appropriate to the pre-dental, suckling stage.

In the next stages of oral development, biting and chewing, the infant becomes more active with respect to his food. He selects and appropriates and changes in some degree what the environment offers. With the growth of incisors he is for a period in transition from suckling to “biteling.” He makes the discrimination that the nipple is not to be bitten while he sucks from it, but for the rest of his diet he bites off bits of other still partially prepared food. With the eruption of molars, he reaches the chewing stage, which is of paramount importance because it allows for complete destroying of the food. Instead of accepting what is given and uncritically introjecting it, the “chewling” works over what is provided by the environment so as to insure his assimilation of it. It is on the basis of such competence, combined with almost complete development of sensory discrimination and perception of objects, that the child begins to speak and brings to a head the process of forming his “I.”

The process of weaning—of “making” the child give up its suckling—is always regarded as difficult and traumatic. But it is very likely that, if there has been no previous starvation and failure of affection (that is, no accumulation thus far of interruptions, distortions, or unfinished aspects of the earlier stages), the child will be ready and eager to exercise his newly developed powers and to leave behind the introjective confluence. It was the tragic fact that this normal sequence almost never takes place in our society— that there is, therefore, imperfect biting off and chewing from the beginning—that led Freud and others to conceive as normal "partial introjection,” the gulping down of poorly chewed morsels of one kind or another.

With biting, chewing, and the very important functions of locomotion and ability to approach, the child has the chief types of aggression available to him and under his control for his own growth. These, obviously, are not “anti-social,” although they are the very antithesis of passive confluence. But if these biological activities are not used in the service of the growth-functions—as initiative, selection, overcoming of obstacles, seizing upon and destroying in order to assimilate—then the surplus energy finds discharge as displaced aggressions—domination, irritability, sadism, lust for power, suicide, murder, and their mass-equivalent, war! The organism does not develop in continuous creative adjustment with its environment—so that the “I” is a system of executive functions concerned with orientation and manipulation. Instead, it is saddled with an “I” which is a thrown-together collection of unassimilated introjects—traits and qualities taken over from “the authorities,” which he cannot stomach, relations which he did not bite oft and chew, knowledge he doesn’t understand, sucking fixations he cannot dissolve, disgust he cannot release.

When, by reversing retroflections, an amount of aggressive energy is detached from the self as victim, it may be usefully reemployed for biting through and chewing physical food and its psychological counterpart: problems that must be faced, fixations that must be dissolved, concepts of the “I” which must be destroyed. That is what is attempted in the following experiments, but just as in working with muscular contractions, you must go slowly and not force yourself or you are sure to be disappointed and discouraged. The main resistances of which you will become aware will be impatience and greed, which are emotions perfectly normal to the gulping stage, but not to the more mature, differentiated stage of selection, biting off, and ruminating. Be content at first with the development of awareness. You will have accomplished much when, by concentrating on your mode of eating, you learn to distinguish between liquid food which may appropriately be drunk and solid food which cannot be handled adequately by drinking it down.

Concentrate on your eating without reading or “thinking.” Simply address yourself to your food. Meals have for us become social occasions for the most part. The primitive goes off by himself to cat. Follow his example to this extent: set aside one meal a day to eat in solitude, and learn how to cat. This may take about two months, bur, after that, you will have acquired a new taste, a new source of enjoyment, and you will not relapse. If you are impatient, this will seem too long. You will want magical effects, quick results without effort. For you to get rid of your introjects, you yourself must do the destroying and the reintegrating.

Notice your resistances to addressing the food. Do you taste the first few bites and then fall into a trance of “thinking,” daydreaming, wanting to talk—meantime losing contact with the taste? Do you bite off your food by clean, efficient action of the front teeth? In other words, do you bite through on a meat sandwich held in your hands, or do you close your jaws part way and then tear off a hunk? Do you ever use your molars up to the point of complete destruction of the food, that is, liquefaction? Just notice whatever it is you do, without deliberately changing anything. Many changes will occur spontaneously if you keep in contact with your food.

As you eat with awareness, do you feel greed? Impatience? Disgust? Do you blame the hurry and bustle of modern life for your gulping of meals? Is it different when you have leisure? Do you avoid food that is flat and tasteless, or do you just down it without demurring? Do you experience a “symphony” of flavors and textures in your food, or have you so desensitized your palate that it all tastes pretty much alike?

When it is not a matter of physical but of “mental” food, how does the matter stand? Consider the same questions with regard, for instance, to your intake from the printed page. Do you skip over hard paragraphs or do you work them through? Is your taste for the sweet and easy alone—light fiction or “feature” stories—which you can gulp down without active response? Or do you compel yourself to partake only of “heavy” literature, though you get little pleasure for your effort?

What about your visual intake at the movies? Do you fall into a kind of trance and drink in the scenes? Study this as an instance of confluence.

In the same context let us consider alcoholism, which, although complicated and with many ramifications (including somatic changes), is muscularly anchored in oral under-development. No cure can have lasting effect or be more than a suppression unless the alcoholic (“adult” suckling) progresses to the stage of biting and chewing. Fundamentally, the drinker wants to drink his environment in—to get easy and total confluence without the excitement (which to him is a painful effort) of contacting, destroying and assimilating. He is a bottle-baby, a gulper, reluctant to take solid food and chew it. This applies to the steak on his platter and to the larger problems of his life-situation. He wants his solutions in liquid form, pre-prepared, so that he need but drink them down.

Socially, he wants to enter into immediate confluence without preparatory contact with the other person. His acquaintance of the moment becomes a pal to whom he will “pour out his heart.’’ He by-passes those parts of his personality which would exercise discrimination; and then, on the basis of these supposedly deep and sincere but actually most superficial social contacts, he comes forth with impatient, extravagant demands.

Just as uncritically, he takes in social reproaches and accepts them as coming from himself, for he has a strong self-aggressive conscience. He may silence it by drowning it in alcohol, but when he awakes, its vindictiveness is redoubled. Since his aggression is not used in attacking his physical food or his problems, the surplus which is not invested in his conscience often turns outward in surly, irrelevant fights.

Drinking is the adequate way of appropriating fluids, and inebriation’s easy sociability is warming and pleasurable. But these are only phases of experience, not the whole of it, and when they continually occupy the foreground as imperious needs, the possibility of other kinds and levels of experience is ruled out.

A similar mechanism manifests itself in sexual promiscuity. The demand here is for immediate terminal satisfaction, without preliminary contact and development of the relationship. Since he is cold and the victim of tactile starvation, the promiscuous person seeks crude tactile proximity of the skin surface as his final sexual aim. While there are, of course, other complicating factors, what again is outstanding is impatience and greed.

For the most part, our views on introjection arouse nearly unanimous disagreement on first encounter. We cite a few comments from students:

“I cherish the illusion—which you will no doubt diagnose as neurotic—that being a human being implies more respect for the grandeur of the soul than to address myself to food.”

“I don’t see how changing your eating habits is supposed to aid your ability to reject introjected ideas. I just don’t see it. Even if early eating habits are connected with all this, simply changing your present habits isn’t going to suddenly enable you to see that Freud’s concept of introjection is wrong while this one may be partially correct. Why can’t we work on something that will actually be of me rather than all this junk?”

“The whole business of the parallel between forcible intake of food and forcible intake of behavior is tenuous, especially when carried past just being a figurative way of speaking. The organism does not vomit out behavior, nor does it bite and chew experience. True, complex behavior may be introjected, but to me this has little to do with the eating functions, certainly when infancy is past. I have disregarded the eating experiments as I think they are useless, a priori, and I won’t even give them the limited attention I’ve paid the other experiments—that is, doing them for the sake of curiosity. In the authors’ own terms, I refuse to introject what they have to say about introjection.”

“I’m no more impressed or moved to action by this drill than I have been by the others. Although much has been learned in the process of reading it, namely, an acute sense of awareness of one’s thoughts, motives, habits, etc., with possible permanent benefits derived therefrom, I still fail to comprehend the essential thought behind this mass of verbal confusion. I assume that the dominating thought is to make the individual more cognizant of various processes within himself, and therefore expel many undesirable factors present in his thoughts and actions. As previously stated, though, I feel that the authors assume too much insight on the part of the student, and I feel further that the drills involve much too much preoccupation with self—a decidedly dangerous thing if devoid of trained guidance.”

In all of the above excerpts there is the customary modern emphasis on verbal evidence and verbal proof. As a matter of fact, there are a number of “objective” experimental findings which could be brought to bear in this connection, perhaps sufficient to oblige the above-quoted students to give intellectual assent to the theory presented here; however, what we seek is not verbal agreement but the dynamic effects that you may obtain by directly discovering and proving the points in your own non-verbal functioning.

Several persons, apparently unable to reject the theory without more ado, rejected it temporarily by postponing its non-verbal testing:

“I question this whole thing on the—Oh, how the hell can there be a functional identity of any such sort? I’m going to put this whole thing off until I go home this summer and work on it then.”

Whatever doubts they had about the theory, most students took an experimental attitude toward the examination of their eating processes and reported various discoveries about their usual modes of ingestion:

"After concentrating on my eating I found that I didn’t know how to car, but bolted my food gluttonously. I can’t stop eating with a great rush even when there’s no reason to hurry. I find that I use my molars scarcely at all.”

The problem of keeping a presentable silhouette dominated many reports.

"I would try on a dress that looked beautiful in Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar. What I saw in the mirror didn’t look like my long, willowy, blonde ideal. I would get sore and disgusted at myself and swear to go on a diet. Then I would get to feeling so sorry for myself that I would sit down and cat some candy or a piece of cake.”

We quote in detail an account of attempting to chew some food to the point of liquefaction:

"Since I’m quite well known in the family as a food-gulper and a ‘reading-when-eating’ type, I looked forward to the eating experiments with interest. They have worked, but for fear they might work too well. I’ve stopped before going too far.

"First, I noted how I took the food, and wasn’t too surprised to find that I’m a ‘partial-biter, tear-the-rest-off’ sort of operator. It was fairly easy to slow down enough to bite through my food as completely as I could before starting to chew. But since I rarely cat without reading, simply this concentration on biting off instead of tearing off sent me into daydreaming. I just sat there dumb, unaware of what I was doing and not thinking anything—so that literally before I knew it the food was down.

"As to whether I ever liquefy my food the answer emphatically is no (probably a reaction against my father who is an ardent Fletcherizer, although he doesn’t actually count, and thus is the slowest eater I’ve ever seen). I tried to chew and chew until the food was about as liquid as I could stand it and noted two reactions: “First, my tongue started to ache toward the back. What usually takes place is that after I have food in my mouth nothing happens until the food is on the way down the esophagus—that is, I'm not aware of swallowing, gulping, breathing or anything else. What happened, now that I tried to masticate completely, was that I found myself running out of air. My tongue started to ache uncomfortably. I seemed to be holding my breath. So I had to push the food to the sides of my mouth, make the gulping motions (although I wasn't swallowing anything), and then take a deep breath before going on. After these setting-up exercises I would have to bring back the food from wherever it had scattered in the sides of my mouth and then go to work on the messy left-overs of that last bite.

“This description is particularly detailed and, to me, nauseating, because that’s how I felt after a couple of bites—nauseated. The food began to taste terrible and I now found myself deliberately avoiding trying to taste or even feel (in a sensory fashion) what was going on in my mouth. I usually don’t taste or feel what’s going on there anyhow, but this experiment did bring back a lot of taste, etc., so that now to get rid of the unpleasantness aroused by it I had to try to ‘desensitize myself.’

“What I meant above when I wrote that I stopped the above experiment before going too far is that I was feeling so disgusted with what was going on in my mouth that I felt a very strong tendency to vomit. Immediately I switched over into daydream or stupor, telling myself, ‘Now let’s not spoil a whole meal by getting sick; after all, there’s a limit.’ So I stopped. Now this is obviously a resistance, but that’s what I did twice.”

A student who feels that he has good eating habits mentions the following:

“As a child these good caring habits were not present. I was an extremely poor eater and probably introjected most of what I ate, attempting to think or talk about anything to keep from becoming aware of what I was eating. The change occurred somewhere between my tenth and thirteenth year. The major event in my life during this period was when my father remarried and we finally moved away from my uncle’s home where we had been living."

A number of students made comments such as the following:

“I am utterly amazed at how closely my ways of dealing with problems, with reading matter, with movies, etc., parallel my ways of dealing with food.”

Experiment 16: Dislodging and Digesting Introjects

Introjection is characterized by a particular constellation of emotions and behavioral tendencies: impatience and greed; disgust and its negation through loss of taste and appetite; fixation, with its desperate hanging on and clinging to what has ceased to be nourishing. Let us examine these in detail.

Infants and children are said to be impatient and greedy. But these terms, appropriate as applied to adults who are underdeveloped, are misapplied to children. A baby, when hungry, wants the breast. If he does not get it right away, he squalls. Impatiently? No, for this is all that he can do in the direction of satisfying his need. This is not something to be corrected but rather to be grown out of. Impatience has no meaning apart from its opposite, patience. Adults have had a chance to differentiate these behaviors by acquiring the working-through techniques which, when applied, constitute patience. The child has not.

If he has a loving mother, his “hunger-cry” is to her an adequate and unresented signal. Given the breast, he eagerly and immediately swallows down the milk. Greedily? No, for liquid food requires no delay before ingestion. The behavior of the child is mistakenly called impatience and greed when obviously it is aggression that is fully adequate in the child’s mother-confluent situation. Only when the primitive aggression does not, as the child gets older, differentiate into techniques for tackling and working through obstacles are we entitled to speak of impatience and greed. Although equipped with the apparatus and the opportunity for taking care of himself, such an “old child”—still wielding his aggression in its original, primitive form—insists that it be done for him and done at once!

If you investigate your own impatience, you will be able to confirm this. You will realize that it is a primitive aggression—a crude, angry reaction to frustration. To say, “I am impatient with you” is equivalent to, “I am annoyed with you because you do not come across with what I want right now, and I don’t want to have to put out the additional effort (destruction of obstacles) to get you to come across.”

In babies and cubs we can easily observe the further differentiation of aggression at the biting stage. They like to try out this new ability by sinking their teeth into whatever is bitable. The mouth, too, becomes an organ of manipulation. Subsequently, the hands take over the early exploratory function of the mouth and then its manipulating. As more and more discrimination and working over of food is required, the mouth specializes correspondingly in tasting and destroying.

Parental interference comes seriously into the picture at the biting stage. On the one hand, biting is punished as cruel and naughty, and. on the other, food that the child does not want or does not want at the time is forced into him. His tendency under these circumstances to make a barrier of his teeth to the unwanted food is forcibly vanquished. Denied adequate expression, the child’s oral aggression must be displaced. Part of it is retroflected to suppress the punishable food-rejecting. Part of it turns against persons. This comprises the so-called “cannibalism” of those who want “to eat you up.”

In order to get down and keep down the unwanted food the child has to repress his disgust. Furthermore, spontaneous use of his teeth has been denied him; he was punished for his “cruel and naughty” biting and also for clamping his teeth against the unwanted food. Only the behavior of the suckling—which he was in the process of outgrowing—is fully safe. His development out of this stage has been interfered with, and, because of the maiming of his “biteling” behavior, he retains in some degree or relapses into the “impatience and greed” of the suckling. Only liquid food still tastes good, but this is never enough to gratify hunger.

Because of “scheduled feedings” and other “scientific” practices applied to you as an infant, the blocking of oral aggression as described above is probably in some degree present in your own case. This condition is the basic prerequisite for tendencies to introject—to swallow down whole what does not belong in your organism. We shall, therefore, attack the problem at the source, namely, the process of eating. The solution involves remobilization of disgust, which is not pleasant and will rouse strong resistances. For once, therefore, in stating the following motor experiment, we do not propose it as something to try out in a spontaneous fashion to see what happens, but we appeal to your courage and charge you with it as a task.

During each and every meal, take one bite—remember, just one, single bite!—and liquefy the food completely by chewing. Do not let one morsel escape destruction, but seek it out with your tongue and bring it into position for further chewing. When you are satisfied that the food has been fully liquefied, drink it down.

In performing this task you will “forget yourself” in the middle of the operation and swallow. You will become inattentive. You will have no time. On occasion you will feel that you have “spoiled the taste” of something good. When you encounter disgust, you will be sorry you ever started the experiment. But sooner or later a welcome by-product of the experiment will be that you get much more taste and nourishment out of your mouthful than you would have imagined possible, and with this you will begin to have an increased feeling of yourself as an active agent.

The task is restricted to a single bite per meal, for this, no matter how simple it may sound, will be hard to do. It requires the remarshalling of an enormous amount of energy. The chewing as such is not what you are after but rather the attitude of de straying and assimilating real material. Avoid any obsessional practice such as counting your jaw-movements (Fletcherism), for this only distracts your attention.

As the functional counterpart of the task of chewing up a single bite of food, give yourself the same training in the intellectual sphere. For example, take a single difficult sentence in a book that is “tough meat," and analyze it, that is, take it apart thoroughly. Get the precise connotation of each word. For the sentence as a whole decide on its clarity or vagueness, its truth or falsity. Make it your own, or else make clear to yourself what part of it you don’t understand. Perhaps you have not failed to comprehend, but instead the sentence is incomprehensible. Decide this for yourself.

Another profitable experiment, one which makes full use of the functional identity between eating physical food and “stomaching” some interpersonal situation is the following: When in an impatient mood—angry, upset, resentful—and thus inclined to gulp, apply the aggression in a deliberate attack on some physical food. Take an apple or a tough heel of bread and wreak your vengeance on it. In accordance with your mood, chew as impatiently, hastily, viciously, cruelly as you can. But bite and chew—do not gulp!

The neurotic’s condemnation of aggression has two exceptions. The first is when the aggression is retroflected and he then drives or punishes himself, and the second is when the aggression is invested in conscience and moral judgment and is then directed against both himself and others. If he will use some of the aggression dentally —that is, in the biological aggression of the teeth—he will correspondingly let up in his attacks on himself and others, and, what is most important, he will learn to recognize aggressiveness as a healthy function which prevents introjection. He will learn to reject what is indigestible in his physical or psychological system and to bite off and chew what is potentially digestible and nourishing if adequately destroyed and assimilated. And, with respect to the introjects he now has, he will learn to bring them up and get rid of them or else, at last, to chew them properly as preparation for genuine digestion.

Disgust as a word comes from the prefix dis-, meaning “without,” and gustus, meaning “relish.” This understates what we experience as disgust. When disgusted we have nausea, the physical sensations that go with reverse peristalsis in the alimentary tract. This changed direction of the gastric and esophageal contractions is, of course, designed to regurgitate and thus make possible the elimination or the further chewing, as in ruminants like the cow, of indigestible or improperly masticated food.

The same process occurs in the organism when the environment presents objects or situations which could not possibly be mistaken for physical food but which can be termed instead “perceptual food.” We retch even at the sight of a decomposed horse. You may “feel your gorge rise” slightly at mere reading of these words, and you certainly would if we elaborated further on the possibilities of taking the dead horse as food. In other words, the organism reacts to certain objects and situations—and we cannot impress this upon you too strongly—as if they had been taken into the alimentary tract!

Our language is full of expressions which reflect the psychosomatic identity of disgust produced by physical food and by what is indigestible only in the psychological sense. Consider, for instance, “You make me sick,” “I gag over having to do this,” “The sight was nauseating.” It would be easy to think up another series of verbalisms about belching, that relatively milder but omnipresent indicator of bad digestion.

Disgust is the desire to bring up, to vomit forth, to reject material which is disagreeable to the organism. One “gets the stuff down" only by numbing and putting out of commission the healthy organism’s natural means of discrimination, smelling, tasting, and so on. In such an event it is crucial at least that one feel the disgust later on, and thus be enabled to “get the stuff back up.” Since introjects have been gulped down precisely in this manner, their elimination from your system requires that you remobilize disgust.

Neurotics talk much of being rejected. This is, for the most part, a projection onto others of their own rejecting (as we shall consider further in the next experiment). What they refuse to feel is their latent disgust with what they have incorporated in their own personalities. If they did, they would have to vomit up and reject many of their “loved” identifications—which were unpalatable and hateful at the time when swallowed down. Or else they would have to go through the laborious process of bringing them up, working them through, and then at last assimilating them.

Forced feeding, forced education, forced morality, forced identifications with parents and siblings, result in literally thousands of unassimilated odds and ends lodged in the psychosomatic organism as introjects. They are both undigested and, as they stand, indigestible. And men and women, long accustomed to being resigned to “the way things are,” continue to hold their noses, desensitize their palates, and swallow down still more.

In psychoanalytical practice a patient may lie down and bring up verbally all the undigested material accumulated since his last session. This furnishes relief, for he has performed the psychological counterpart of vomiting. But the therapeutic effect of this as such is nil, for he will introject again. At the moment of taking it in he does not feel disgust for what later he will disgorge. If he did, he would reject it then and not save it for his treatment hour. He has not learned to chew up and work through what is nourishing and necessary. He will drink down his analyst’s words, too, as something new with which to identify, rather than mulling them over and assimilating them. He expects his therapist to do the work of interpretation for him, and he will later spew out these very interpretations to his bored friends. Otherwise, “intellectually accepting” the interpretation—without conflict, suffering, and disgust—he merely imposes on himself a new burden, a further complication of his concept of himself.

Orthodox psychoanalysis makes the error of not regarding all introjects as “unfinished business” to be worked through and assimilated; consequently, it accepts as normal much in the present-life attitude which is not actually the patient’s own and not spontaneous. If, instead of limiting themselves to working through merely the dreams and more spectacular symptoms, analysts would concentrate on every aspect of behavior, they would find that the introjected “I” is not the healthy “I.” The latter is completely dynamic, consisting entirely of functions and shifting boundaries between what is accepted and what is rejected.

When one looks upon the introject as an item of “unfinished business,” its genesis is readily traced to a situation of interrupted excitement. Every introject is the precipitate of a conflict given up before it was resolved. One of the contestants—usually an impulse to act in a given manner—has left the field; replacing it, so as to constitute some kind of integration (though a false and inorganic one) is the corresponding wish of the coercing authority. The self has been conquered. In giving up, it settles for a secondary integrity—a means of surviving, though beaten—by identifying with the conqueror and turning against itself. It takes over the coercer’s role by conquering itself, retroflecting the hostility previously directed outward against the coercer. This is the situation usually referred to by the conventional term “self-control.” Here, although actually defeated, the victim is encouraged by the victorious coercer to perpetuate his defeat by forever rejoicing in the deluded notion that be was the victor!

Though admittedly unpleasant, there is no other way to discover what in you is not part of yourself except by remobilizing disgust and the accompanying urge to reject. If you wish to unburden yourself of those foreign bodies in your personality which are introjects, you must, in addition to the chewing experiments, intensify awareness of taste, find the spots where you are “taste-blind,” and resensitize them. Become aware of changes in taste during mastication, differences in structure, consistency, temperature. In doing this, you are sure to revive disgust. Then, as with any other painful experience that is your own, you must confront this too, become aware of it, and accept it. When, finally, there comes the urge to vomit, do so. You will feel it as terrible and painful only because of your resistances to it. A small child vomits with perfect ease and in a strong orgastic stream; immediately afterward he is quite happy again, rid of the foreign matter that was bothering him.

“Fixations” form another most important part of the introjective constellation. They are the tendencies to static clinging and suckling when the situation has progressed to the point where active biting through and chewing are required. To be fixated is to be confluent with the situation of sucking, of skin-proximity, of holding on to, of dreamy recollection, etc. In our view a fixation does not result from a particular traumatic interpersonal or Oedipal experience, but is the work of a character-structure, a rigid pattern repeated continuously in the life of the neurotic. You may recognize the fixated, confluent type by his clenched jaw, his indistinct voice, and his laziness in chewing.

He hangs on “doggedly.” He will not let go, but he cannot—and this is the decisive point—bite the piece off. He hangs on to exhausted relationships from which neither he nor his partner are any longer getting any profit. He hangs on to outworn customs, to memories, to grudges. He will not finish what is unfinished and try a new adventure. Where there is risk, he visualizes only the possible losses and never the compensating gains. His aggression, confined to holding his jaws locked—as if trying to bite himself—can be employed to destroy neither the object on which he is fixated nor such new obstacles as may present themselves. He is squeamish about hurting and—projecting his unacknowledged wish to hurt— fearful of being hurt.

Castration-fear has as a major component the clinging fear to hurt or be hurt, and the vagina dentata, a frequent fantasy of castration-anxiety, is the man’s own unfinished bite projected into the woman. Little can be accomplished in working on castration-fantasies until dental aggression has been remobilized; but once this natural destructiveness has been reintegrated into the personality, not only the fear of damage to the penis but also the fear of other damages—to honor, property, eyesight, etc.—are reduced to proper size.

Here is a simple technique for starting to mobilize the fixed jaw. If you notice that your teeth are frequently clenched or that you are in a state of grim determination, instead of working with ease and interest, make your lower and upper teeth touch each other lightly. Keep them neither clamped nor apart. Concentrate and await developments. Sooner or later your teeth may begin to chatter, as if with cold. Allow this to spread, if it will, into a general shivering excitement all through your muscles. Try to let go until you are shivering and shaking all over.

If you succeed in this experiment, use the opportunity to try to increase the looseness and amplitude of your jaw. Touch your teeth together in various positions—incisors, front molars, back molars— and meantime press your fingers against the sides of your head where the jaws meet the ears. When you find painful spots of tension, use these as foci of concentration. Likewise, if you achieve general trembling in this or other experiments, use it to try to experience a complete giving up of all rigidity—to the point of dizziness or collapse of tension.

Try the alternative of clamping your teeth hard in any position —the situation of biting through. This will create a painful tension in the jaws that will spread to the gums, mouth, throat and eyes. Concentrate on the pattern of tension, and then, as suddenly as you can, let go with your jaws.

To mobilize your stiff mouth, open it wide in talking and bite through your words. Spit them out like bullets from a machine-gun.

The “hanging-on bite” is not restricted to the jaws, but spreads to throat and chest, impeding breathing and aggravating anxiety. It spreads also to the eyes, bringing about a fixed stare and preventing a “piercing” glance. If your states of anxiety tend to come when you are speaking—for example, in public, or even in a small group— you will benefit by considering the following: speaking is organized exhaling. Inhalation takes in oxygen for metabolism; exhalation produces the voice. (See how difficult it is to speak while inhaling.) When excited, you increase the speed of your speech (impatience and greed manifested not on the intake but this rime on the output side) but do not inhale sufficiently, and breathing thus becomes difficult.

An experiment simple in structure yet exceedingly difficult to perform will remedy this, besides being an excellent means of making you feel your non-verbal existence in relation to your verbalizing. It coordinates breathing and thinking (subvocal speaking). You have already done it in part in your earlier work on internal silence. Talk in fantasy, silently and subvocally, but with a particular audience, perhaps a single person. Attend to your “talking" and your breathing. Try to have no words in your throat (“mind") during the inhalation; but let out your thoughts and your breath at the same time. Notice how often you hold your breath.

You will perceive, again, how much of your thinking is a one-sided interpersonal relationship, not a give and take; you are always lecturing, commenting, judging, or pleading, inquiring, etc. Seek for the rhythm of speaking and listening, give and rake, exhaling and inhaling. (Though insufficient alone, this coordination of breathing and thinking is the chief basic therapy for stammering.)

The introjection experiments call forth more violent protests than any others in the series.

“The authors carry this chewing and food consciousness a little too far and insist upon it ad nauseam. That we eat the way we do is usually unrecognized by us, but surely there must be an easier way to point this out.”

“Your statements are nothing but organized irrationality.”

“If you are literally inviting us to chew a piece of food until it disgusts us so much that we throw up, then this is the most stupid business I’ve ever encountered. I do agree that we often do feel like throwing up for many causes, and perhaps we would feel better if we did throw up; however, like anything else it could get to be a habit and then we’d be in quite a fix.”

“Eating is eating and that’s all. Following your suggestion, I took a bite and chewed and chewed it until I was tired and couldn’t chew any more. Then I swallowed. Okay, that's it. I didn’t feel nauseous. I don’t see how anyone can go into such detail about vomiting. What is there to vomit about? It’s food! They eat it every day. And then, suddenly, after reading your experiment, they eat it again and vomit. They’re certainly open to suggestion!”

The statement just above came from one of the very few students who expressed any astonishment that food, when chewed thoroughly, should arouse disgust in anyone. Most persons simply took it for granted that masticating to the point of liquefaction would produce nausea, and, furthermore, that it would continue to do so permanently! But why should it? As well stated above, “What is there to vomit about? It’s food!”

If there is nothing intrinsically disgusting about this particular bite of food—in other words, if it is good food and you are hungry—then, if thorough chewing of it arouses nausea, you must be making a mistake! You must be tapping some repressed disgust, which was aroused but not expressed on past occasions. When obliged to down something unpalatable, your method was to inhibit chewing and desensitize yourself to the eating process. You behave now as if you still have to do this—and do it with respect to all food.

Actually, you are now in a position to be discriminating. You need no longer be, as one student put it, “the good child who eats everything.” What disgusts you, you can reject; what you find nutritious and appetizing, you can consume with gusto. But only after you have remobilized and expressed the repressed disgust!

Let us go over this again. Disgust is a natural barrier possessed by every healthy organism. It is a defense against taking into the organism what does not belong there—what is indigestible or foreign to its nature. However, by dint of great effort, parents and other authorities can get the child to demobilize disgust—that is, attack and put out of commission its own defenses against what is unwholesome. The child’s original ability—which has been experimentally demonstrated over and over again—to pick a balanced diet appropriate to its needs is overthrown by an arbitrary scheduling of officially designated “correct” foods in “correct” amounts at “correct” times. The child eventually “adjusts” to this by gulping down whatever is given with just as little contact with it as possible. Once the natural defenses of the organism have been breached, it is then comparatively easy to get the child to gulp down all sorts of unnatural and arbitrary “mental food” and thus “preserve society” for still another generation.

The healthy organism’s way of eating—or, in its broader meaning, its way of selecting and assimilating from its environment what is needed for its own sustenance and growth—cannot, unfortunately, be restored over-night. Full remobilization of disgust for what is disgusting calls a halt to further introjecting, but it does not forthwith cause to be spewed forth what has already been introjected and now “lies heavy in the mental stomach.” This takes time and a transitional period of more or less frequent or chronic nausea.

Persons differ widely in their attitude toward vomiting. For some it comes relatively easily and brings profound relief. Others have highly organized defenses against it.

“I have not been able to mobilize the feelings of disgust spoken of, probably because of tremendous fear of vomiting. I do not remember the origin of this fear, but I can remember that as a very young child I struggled for hours in order to prevent vomiting. Whether or not this was connected with forced feeding I don’t know, but my mother still does talk about how, when I was little, she had to force food into me, mouthful after mouthful.”

“In doing the experiment I did feel disgust and the desire to regurgitate. But that is as far as I went, for I have always been averse to vomiting. When I have known that it would be good for me and have tried it. the effort has almost always seemed too great. Attempts to force vomiting by the finger-in-the-throat technique always produce a pain in my chest, which is my reason for suppressing the desire to complete the act.”

“I can vomit easily. As a child, when I had an upset stomach, my parents sent me to the bathroom with instructions on how to vomit. The result is that, for me, this is a perfectly natural and tremendously relieving process.”

"When I gulp down my food, I have, pretty soon afterward, a pressure in my stomach or, more often, higher up in my esophagus. It feels as if something is stuck there and can’t move forward or backward. This is the very same feeling I had when, as a child, I was late for school. On those occasions I often vomited on my way to school.”

“Mealtime was the occasion, when I was a child, that my father chose to play the heavy-parent and lay down the law. Sometimes it took my appetite so that I couldn’t eat a bite, and I remember several instances in which I had to excuse myself from the table and go vomit.”

The remobilization of disgust in connection with eating may bring to the surface a number of past experiences for reconsideration.

“Perhaps it was just some kind of generalization, but the results I got in the eating experiments started me to thinking about a lot of things in my life. My father kept coming to mind. He is a very domineering man, one who wants to keep his children from growing up. I think that playing parent is for him his life-work to a much greater extent than his profession, and from this I don’t think he ever intends to retire. Many of the ideas that he’s crammed down my throat I think I’m starting to ‘vomit up.’ They flood into my mind, and I analyze them in terms of present-day social and moral views. It is perfectly amazing to see how many things I've taken for granted as being my views, when it’s perfectly obvious now that they’re his. They don’t fit into my life, and already I feel a tremendous relief in sloughing off some of them. They have made my life so needlessly complicated.”

One student reported in great detail the bringing up and freeing himself from “introjected blame” in connection with the accidental death, when he was a child, of a sibling. The process of ejecting the introject began with burning sensations in the stomach. These began after he had been performing the eating experiments for a short period.

Another student reported the onset of burning sensations in the stomach almost from the start of these experiments, but it was not until the work with introjects that the following events developed:

“In connection with wondering what introjects I might have lodged in me as foreign bodies, I went back to the work on confluence where we considered traits, speech, dress, etc., and from whom we had imitated them. I became aware of thinking about the problem of tolerance. Then came: ‘How I hate her!’ The words ‘I’ and ‘her’ were emphasized—really emphasized, with fists clenched, biceps contracted, lips compressed, teeth clamped together, eyebrows knit, temples pulsating, cars straining backward, and the entire body pressing hard against the ground and bench (this experiment was conducted in the park). Simultaneously—and this is what I considered important—the tension of the stomach and previously mild burning sensation increased to such an extent that I was sick. Then came the words ‘Aunt Agnes!’—and all the tensions, burnings, pressures and pulsations vanished. The only symptom that lingered on—and then only for a few minutes—was the sour oral taste. ‘Aunt Agnes’ was a masculine, domineering, authoritarian woman who was temporarily put in charge of me when I was three.

“Prior to the start of the awareness experiments and throughout the span of my remembered life, I would fall asleep readily and rarely had dreams. Just before the confluence experiment, however, I began to have nightmares, and I had them every night. As soon as I spewed up this ‘hateful introject,’ the nightmares disappeared and my sleep has been untroubled since.”