THEORIES OF INTROJECTION AND THEIR RELATION TO WILLIAM JAMES' CONCEPT OF BELIEF: AN APPLICATION OF THE UNITARY APPROACH OF GESTALT THERAPY

The "unitary approach" of Gestalt Therapy postulates that for any psychological conception of behavior to convey its full meaning, it must be referred to the context of interactions in the organism/environment field from which the conception must have been abstracted. The psychological concept of "introjection," as developed and first introduced in psychoanalytic thought by Sandor Ferenczi, suggests that the process represented by that concept is a variable organismic contact function occurring in the organism/environment field. By integrating Ferenczi's formulations concerning "introjection" with psychological principles of the "unitary approach," the concept of "introjection" could be delimited as referring to the psychological process through which the organism takes in elements of the environment.; Through the integration of Ferenczi's theories with the principles of the "unitary approach," a standard was devised which was used to critique the applications of the concept of "introjection" as these appeared in the works of Freud, Abraham, Jones, Klein and other psychologically oriented writers. It was found that many of the references to the process of "introjection" as an intrapsychic event could be traced to either a neglect or misunderstanding of the seminal works of Ferenczi or to the lack of adequate references to the organism/environment field, or both.; The delimited concept was also used as the standard for differentiating "introjection" from other, synonymous, ambiguous or overlapping terms that appear in the social science literature as substitutions for it. The principal psychological concepts which were differentiated from the concept of "introjection" were identification, incorporation, and internalization.; The concept of the "introject" was generically delimited to mean the product of the process of "introjection." As representing the elements of the environment taken into the organism through the process of "introjection," the "introjects" are viewed as being subjected to certain organismic powers which influence the structure of the "introject" as it appears in the different configurations of psychological awareness (e.g., as fragments of memory, blocks and inhibitions in outgoing behavior, social orientations, rhetorical attitudes).; The conceptions of "introjection" as psychological process and the "introject" as a consequence of that process were related to the psychological aspect of the process of "belief" as developed in the theories of William James. James' notion of the "object" of thought was compared to the concept of the "introject" and it was demonstrated that the latter formulation was sufficiently more encompassing as an "object" or "belief." Thye pyschological nature of "belief" was shown to embrace the fundamental premises of the "unitary approach" regarding the dynamics of the organism/environment field when the process of "belief" is regarded as an attitude towards the "introjects." The practicability of viewing "belief" as a psychological process involving both the organism and its environment was demonstrated in the applications of the notion of "belief as an attitude towards the introjects" to two (hypothetical) therapist-patient interactions.