Incorporation

Disciplines > Psychoanalysis > Concepts > Incorporation

Description | Discussion | See also

Description

Incorporation is derived from the Latin incorporare, meaning ‘to form into a body'.

It is perhaps the most basic form of taking the outside world into the inner world, being focused on bodily sensation and ingestion.

Although this need not mean actual bodily ingestion, this term is used to explain the way that incorporation is experienced and conceived. By bringing something into the body, I make it undeniably a part of the physical, solid and real me. Once incorporated, it cannot be separated from me, but I can choose what to do with it, including destroying or expelling it.

Discussion

Freud used incorporation to refer to a primitive wish to unite with or cannibalistically destroy an object. It is a a mechanism of the oral phase and a template for later identifications. In Totem and Taboo (1913), he described identification as accomplished through the murder and devouring the primal father.

Jung, who considered deeper factors, identified many myths and monsters by which the ego is orally devoured and consumed.