ABSTRACT
The urgently needed, separated-out mother and father (or their functional substitutes) are the first objects of our love and our hate. They fill the world like gods. We focus on them initially all our anxieties and all our emotions. Once established outside the infant's mind and body, they continue to be taken in as part of the developing mind, which becomes modified by these identifications. These psychic internalizations have their own development and maturation, conceived of differently by psychoanalytic theorists (~ee Schafer, 1968). So identifications can be primitive or mature, and they can have pathological as well as healthy effects. The actual parental others are thus psychically assimilated-in inevitably subjectively distorted form-by evolving identificatory pr()cesses to become dynamic parts of our mental structure. It is one of the chief destructive effects of child abuse and soul murder that healthy, structurebuilding identifications are interfered with.
