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In a footnote Schafer remarks that when he was writing Aspects of Internalization (1968) he had not yet realized “the extent to which the very idea of internalization was part of a major problem in psychoanalytic theorizing” (1976, 177). For Schafer the problem concerns what he regards as the illicit use of pseudospatial terms such as “internal objects.” When analysts employ the term internalization, he writes, “we refer not to a fantasy but to a psychological process, and we are saying that a shift of event, action, or situation in an inward direction or to an inner locale has occurred” (155). The question is, he asks, “inside what?” He then proceeds to develop his perfecdy legitimate claim, mentioned earlier, that there are no mental places, or spaces. Apart from what we now know about the localization of various functions in the brain, Schafer’s claim seems undeniable except that in his efforts to get the language of psychoanalysis straightened out he has forgotten that people think as-ifly, with models, and express themselves as-thoughly, through language, especially when they speak of matters, such as relationships, that cannot be weighed, measured, or located in space. In language, mental places do exist. Even unicorns exist in language! Schafer, who appreciates the danger of reifying abstractions, fails to realize the pointiessness of deliberately literalizing conceptual metaphors, that is, of setting metaphoric models up as straw men by attributing literal reality to what, in context, are consensually understood to be conceptual abstractions expressed through more or less concrete metaphoric language—as in the phrase “internal objects.”

For Meissner “the issue of internalization lies at the very heart of contemporary psychoanalytic concerns” (1981, ix). He makes this statement in the context of the emergence of “a more articulated theory of object relations,” one that “emphasizes the importance of relationships with significant objects both in development and in current adaptive functioning,” on the one hand, and the rise of “a psychology of self” on the other (ix). It does not require much of an argument, says Meissner, to show that the concept of internalization “is central to the dialectic between object and self, and that it provides the conceptual bridge between an object relations theory and a concept of self” (ix). For Meissner, then, what is at stake is not the legitimacy but the centrality of the concept of internalization.