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Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A
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On different introjective
processes and the hypothesis
of an “omega function”
a b
Gianna Williams
a
Consultant Child and Adolescent
Psychotherapist, Adolescent Department ,
Tavistock Clinic , 120 Belsize Lane, London, NW3
5BA
b
Eating Disorders Workshop
Published online: 20 Oct 2009.

To cite this article: Gianna Williams (1999) On different introjective processes and
the hypothesis of an “omega function”, Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal
for Mental Health Professionals, 19:2, 243-253, DOI: 10.1080/07351699909534245

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 On Different Introjective Processes and
the Hypothesis of an "Omega Function"

GIANNA WILLIAMS
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I N THIS PAPER ON INTROJECTIVE PROCESSES, I am mainly relying on

a Kleinian frame of reference and some concepts of Bion. Never-
theless, if I try to describe the central theme, I cannot think of a more
beautiful image than the one provided by Freud (1917) when he spoke,
in "Mourning and Melancholia" of the "shadow of the object falling
upon the ego" and of the paraphrases of this sentence offered by Karl
Abraham (1924) when speaking of the "radiance of the object"
reflected upon the ego.
This play of lights and shadows in the quality of the internal objects
acquires an almost tangible dimension in the description of the inter-
nal world and of the internal space that is central in the work of Klein.
The existence of this internal space was implicitly present in the work
of Freud: he spoke about the shadow of the object; this internal object
must occupy an internal space. In the case of Schreiber, Freud (1911)
spoke of the external catastrophe being a mirror image of an internal
catastrophe.
I shall begin with a description of introjective processes that is
more related to the play of lights than to the play of shadows. I wish to
talk, first of all, of introjective processes that facilitate development.
In the second part of this paper, I will focus on particular types of
introjective processes that create an obstacle to development and may
bring about the introjection of an object performing a function that is
the obverse of alpha function.

Gianna Williams is Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, Adolescent

Department, Tavistock Clinic, and Chair, Eating Disorders Workshop.
Originally published in Williams (1997).

243
 244 GIANNA WILLIAMS

The Play of Lights

In "Envy and Gratitude" (1957), Melanie Klein gave a very beautiful

definition of the process that provides a connective tissue in the
personality. The basis of a feeling of integration, of steadiness, of
inner security, she writes, is the consequence of "the introjection of an
object who loves and protects the self and is loved and protected by
the self (p. 188). Bion (1962) developed Klein's theory, stressing the
function of this introjected object, which is essentially to make feel-
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ings thinkable, understandable, and therefore tolerable. He describes

how it is necessary, for a healthy emotional development, to have the
experience of a parental object (it is often the mother) who can receive
a cluster of sensations, feelings, and discomforts that the child cannot
give a name to and is therefore unable to think about. The function of
this object, defined by Bion as "alpha function" or "reverie," as we
have seen, is the one of keeping in the mind, giving a meaning,
making thinkable those feelings for the child also. It is necessary, in
order to fulfill this function, that the parental object should be able to
tolerate the psychic pain the child cannot tolerate himself. After
repeated experiences of this containment, such a function can be
internalized by the child as he grows up and gradually becomes able
to better deal with his anxiety within his own mental space.
In a recent conference on the theme of reparation, I was struck by
the presentations of two child psychotherapists. The transference
experience of their child patients put across very strikingly their
appreciation of being helped to think. Nicoletta Lana spoke about
Giorgio, a child who was born with a serious malformation of his
diaphragm and who had to be urgently operated on immediately after
his birth. In the first part of her paper, the therapist describes a confu-
sion in Giorgio's internal world, which was similar to the one present
in his body at birth, where necessary boundaries were not yet defined.
We followed through the development of the transference relation-
ship, a process that brought Giorgio, who was 10 years old at the time,
to define his therapy as a "workshop of thoughts" ("officina di
pensieri").
Next, the case of a child who had been severely physically abused
by his mother when he was a baby and had been very close to death
 DIFFERENT INTROJECTTVE PROCESSES 245

was presented by Rosemary Duffy. She spoke about Michael as being

initially full of persecutory anxieties and extremely confused. For him
as well, therapy gradually became a "workshop of thoughts," but,
using 7-year-old Michael's own words, I will share with you the defi-
nition that he gave of one of the central concepts of Wilfred Bion's
theory. This is Michael speaking with his therapist: "I know you were
thinking just then. Sometimes when I see your face thinking, I am
thinking too." Later: "I am thinking about joining a thinking club."
This same child asked his therapist: "Please, help me to think
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thoughts." He certainly wished and was able, at this point, to be

helped to think about "where it hurts and why it hurts."
I will now move from the therapeutic context to an observational
one, always with specific reference to the introjection of an object that
helps to think and negotiate difficult feelings but not, in this case,
traumatic feelings. I will talk about a little girl, Julie, whom I have
observed from birth. She was 19 months old at the time of the obser-
vation I'm going to quote.

Julie

Julie had had a massive tantrum because her mother had prevented her
from playing with a fragile object. She had become red in the face,
had stamped her feet, and had been, even if briefly, very intensively
angry and upset. Mother took her on her lap, and initially, Julie pushed
her away saying, "Go away, go away." Julie had calmed down little
by little while her mother held her lovingly and spoke with a soft
voice. She told her that she could play with something that would not
break so easily. She offered her some plastic stacking beakers. At first
Julie threw the beakers away, and her mother picked them up and
assembled them each inside the other. Then Julie, sitting on the floor,
started a game with the beakers. She built a tower by putting them one
on top of the other, knocked the tower off, built it again, and finally
began to assemble them each inside the other. Mother kept talking
with her, saying that Julie had knocked the tower off but the beakers
were not broken. Julie smiled, repeating, "Not broken." Then she got
up and picked up a doll called Poppy; it was one of her favorites from
the time when she was very little. (I had seen her using it in previous
 246 GIANNA WILLIAMS

games as a sort of alter-ego.) Julie took Poppy by the arm and shook
her, making an angry sound. In fact, the image of the doll having a
tantrum was extremely realistic. Julie then put the doll on her mother's
lap, conveying very clearly the message that she wished for her
mother to make her better. Mother talked to the doll and then gave it
back to Julie, who started the sequence again, shaking the doll and
then putting it on her mother's lap. On the third occasion, Julie
consoled the doll herself, repeating some fragments of her mother's
words. This sequence was repeated many times during this observa-
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tion, and it became more and more of a game.

It is of course difficult to observe the full texture of an introjective
process while it is taking place in an observation. We have been able
to see just a fragment, an episode of this slow process. It was neces-
sary for Julie to repeat the sequence while working at it very seriously,
even if I referred to it as a game. She was working at a differentiation
between a part of herself overwhelmed by feelings of rage (repre-
sented by the doll) and a part that could observe and attempt to under-
stand or even soothe those feelings just as her mother had done with
her, not only then, but, repeatedly, in the preceding 19 months. One of
the most meaningful aspects of this sequence is, in my view, the fact
that Julie has initially put the doll on her mother's lap for her to make
it better, almost as if saying, "You show me how to do it." This atti-
tude, with its component of admiration toward one's object, is very
central to introjective processes that are favorable to development.

The Play of Shadows

I said at the beginning of the paper that I was going to talk about lights
and shadows. I have spoken of "the play of lights," but now I would
like to describe introjective processes that are much more in the area
of shadows, which not only do not facilitate development, but hinder
it. Wilfred Bion (Bion, 1962) described the process that takes place
when the object is impervious and not open to receiving projections.
Projections that have not been accepted return to the infant, as he says,
as "nameless dread."
In my work with patients suffering from eating disorders, I have
developed an interest in the quality of introjective processes and, in
 DIFFERENT INTROJECTIVE PROCESSES 247

particular, in the introjection of a function I could refer to as a possible

omega function in order to stress how its characteristics are at the
opposite end of the spectrum from alpha function. Omega function
derives from the introjection of an object that is not only impervious,
but is both impervious and overflowing with projections. Just as the
introjection of alpha function is helpful in establishing links in orga-
nizing a structure, the introjection of omega function has the opposite
effect, disrupting and fragmenting the development of personality.
This characteristic brings to mind comparatively recent develop-
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ments in the field of attachment theory. Mary Main (Main and

Solomon, 1990) has suggested that a fourth category of attachment
pattern, namely the one of disorganized, disoriented attachment,
should be added to the three well-known categories (secure, ambiva-
lent, and avoidant). The children who developed disorganized, disori-
ented types of attachment had been exposed to the experience of
parents who had themselves suffered a trauma in their lives and were
either frightened or frightening or both. From a psychoanalytic
perspective, frightened or frightening parents are those who project
anxiety instead of containing it.
In order to clarify what I mean by omega function, it may be useful
to give some short examples from two infant observations where
external factors (not related to the psychopathology of the parents)
created a situation where an infant was himself the receptacle of anxi-
ety perceived by him as persecutory. The attempt to reject the intro-
jection of this disorganizing omega function took the form of serious
eating difficulties. In both cases it was impossible for the parental
objects to contain projections of anxiety; in particular, they could not
contain the infant's fear that he himself might die, defined by Bion as
the most crucial primitive anxiety. In both observations there was a
very heavy cloud weighing on the parents. It was a cloud of mourning,
which had not been worked through or which was impossible to work
through. Their state of mind made it difficult for them to accept the
anxieties about the death of their child, and instead, they established a
process that reinforced the infants' anxieties about death. Thus not
only was the infant not himself contained, but he became the recepta-
cle of parental projections. Both infants appeared to have introjected
an object that can be seen as performing an omega function.
 248 GIANNA WILLIAMS

Faruk and Patrick

Faruk was the child of Somali refugee parents; in the families of both
parents, relatives had died because of war or famine. It was impossible
to contact the surviving members because they were moving from one
place to another in order to find food. There was no news from
Somalia at the time when the child was referred to the pediatric
department of a London hospital because of serious feeding difficul-
ties, including food refusal and persistent vomiting. Fouzia, the
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mother, was almost certain that her father had died, but this was a loss
of which she had no certainty therefore, she could not begin to mourn.
Faruk's symptoms were particularly meaningful because he was
rejecting food in a family where many relatives had died of starvation.
It increased the mother's anxieties about the baby's possible death
even more. The fear that the child could die brought about frequent
force-feeding; alternatively, Faruk was fed with the bottle while
asleep. The family was followed with a "participant observation" by a
Tavistock/University of East London student, Mariangela Pinheiro
(Pinheiro, 1993). From her observations we can see a number of
elements supporting the hypothesis that a great deal of anxiety about
death might have overflowed from the parents into the baby and that,
at least to an extent, Faruk's rejection of food might have had the
meaning of warding off the introjection of an overflowing object,
which could have a disorganizing effect on his internal world.
In spite of this warding off of this literal rejection, there is evidence
that some introjections of disruptive and disturbing elements had
taken place. For instance, Faruk is described by the observer at the age
of 1 year and 2 months as incapable of keeping his attention focused
on a task for any length of time, as easily distractable, and as being in
a state of mindlessness and rather clumsy in the coordination needed
to hold an object firmly. Fortunately, these less organized or even
disorganized moments alternated with others where the child was
more coordinated and had better cohesion.
An even more alarming case was described by the same participant
observer (Pinheiro, 1993). Patrick, a 4-month-old baby, was originally
referred to the pediatric department of a London hospital because of
food refusal and spitting out both solid and liquid food. He had
acquired minimum weight since birth, and in this case too, very heavy
 DIFFERENT INTROJECTIVE PROCESSES 249

anxieties concerning death were weighing on the parents. Three chil-

dren had been born before Patrick, all of them premature; they had
died within a few hours after their birth. Patrick was also born prema-
turely, and his mother refused to look at him during the first week
because she was sure that he was "another one to go." The child's
food refusal naturally increased the parent's anxieties in an exponen-
tial way, and this anxiety overflowed into Patrick. He tried to keep the
projections at bay with a violent rejection, much more violent than the
one that could be observed in Faruk. There was an improvement
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through the help of the hospital where the child was admitted, as well
as the help of the participant observer, but it was very difficult indeed
to help the parents to deal with their panicky force-feeding of the
child.
The image of the kitchen as a battlefield littered with food thrown
or spat on the furniture or on the floor by Patrick, described by the
observer from a visit when Patrick was 7 months old, provides a
graphic image of a function that is disruptive, rather than integrative
in the internal world. If we look at the vivid description of the kitchen
in the observation of Patrick in the same way as we would look at a
drawing in a child psychotherapy session, we see that an important
contributory factor in the fragmentation of the internal world is
because of the explosive rage experienced by the child who is not
being offered containment but is used instead as the receptacle of
projections he cannot deal with.
I have used the term omega function instead of minus alpha func-
tion because I did not want to make a reference to Bion's negative
grid. The projection of anxiety into an infant does not, in itself, imply
the presence of those elements of perversion of links, or false links,
which characterize the negative grid. It creates an undesirable link,
even a dangerous one, but not necessarily a perverse link. Indeed, I
doubt that there was anything perverse in projections of anxiety about
death into Faruk or Patrick.

Daniel

I shall conclude this paper with a reference to another premature baby,

a patient who is now an adolescent (Williams, 1997). Daniel was seri-
ously bulimic and suicidal when he started therapy, and he told me
 250 GIANNA WILLIAMS

that at birth he was the smallest baby in the county where his family
lived. He had been in an incubator for over 2 months, and according to
his mother, the doctor had given him up for lost. When Daniel was
still in the incubator, his mother became pregnant with a "replacement
baby" who was born only 11 months after Daniel; had Daniel been
born full-term, there would have been only 8 months between them.
The lack of a containing space that could hold Daniel was very
concrete insofar as he lost the space in the mother's womb he would
have still been entitled to. Additionally, his mother, a woman who had
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herself been very severely deprived in her early infancy and suffered
from severe psychotic symptoms, could not provide a receptive space
for her children. During her frequent admissions to a psychiatric
hospital (the first one followed her attempt to set fire to the house), her
children spent long periods in foster care. Daniel's father was an alco-
holic who was addicted to hard drugs, and he could not look after the
children either. Daniel had become anorexic like his mother at the age
of 15, and bulimic like her when he was 18.
I never met Daniel's mother, although I have some information
about her because she was seen by a colleague at the Tavistock Clinic.
She certainly suffers from severe psychopathology, and this signifi-
cantly differentiates Daniel's case from the infants to whom I referred
earlier. Daniel appears to have introjected, mainly through the rela-
tionship with his mother, an object that spills out chaos, disruption,
and anxiety into his internal world. This was very much in evidence at
the time I started seeing him and when he was attempting to get rid of
this disruptive agent through his bulimic symptoms. At the time when
we started therapy, he binged and vomited up to six times a day, and
the sessions often made me feel flooded by material that was full of
confusion and I had to struggle to make links.
My countertransference experience was, however, very different
from the one I had with patients who were determined to attack links.
Daniel was very frightened that his projections could be lethal and
that I would return them to him. I remember a letter he wrote to me
after a Thursday session.

I've only seen you today and I am already here writing. I am sure
that you are sick of me. I have read almost every minute since
our meeting. I have started reading Plato for my essay, then I
 DIFFERENT INTROJECTTVE PROCESSES 251

remembered that I had not finished the Joyce book I was reading,
so I left Plato and I started reading Joyce. It is now 11.00 at night.
I have read a little bit of Plato, a little bit of Joyce, I have almost
finished Wilde's amazing Portrait of Dorian Gray, but I can't
remember very much about it. Then I started reading Plato again
but I cannot stay with anything. If I could come to a session
tomorrow, you could help me to find some rhyme or reason in
what is happening.
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There is undoubtedly a great deal of idealization in this letter but

also, I think, a genuine wish to learn to take inside something that
might stay; there is also an element of the "please show me how to do
it" that we saw in the relationship between baby Julie and her mother.
One can also hear in his words the presence of an agent that creates
anxiety and disruption, perhaps a disorganizing omega function. His
random grabbing has shifted from food to literature, but still nothing
stays inside.
Time passed, and some areas of light began to emerge side by side
with areas of shadow in Daniel's internal world. I do not think that we
can, as yet, talk about a stable introjection of alpha function, which
could help him with possible disruptive incursions of the omega func-
tion. However, from a descriptive point of view, there is now more
"rhyme and reason" in Daniel's life. He does not suffer from bulimic
symptoms; he has passed some exams; he lives with his girlfriend, a
Spanish student who, I think, has her feet firmly on the ground. The
relationship with his mother is much less conflictual.
Let us return to the internal landscape. Within the scope of this
chapter, I cannot give you a detailed account of a session, but just as I
have described a game of the infant Julie in order to give a glimpse of
her introjection of some aspects of her relationship with her mother, I
will refer briefly to a dream of Daniel's; it has given me hope about
the development of introjective processes. Daniel had to write an
essay on the difference between knowledge and belief and had had
great difficulty in writing this essay. In his dream I spoke to him and
told him that an act of faith was needed in our relationship because he
had no certainty or knowledge about me. It seemed that this dream
was related to something we had spoken about in connection with the
forthcoming holiday and Daniel's feelings that he could have no
 252 GIANNA WILLIAMS

certainty about me. He actually feared that I might be "sick of him"

and might not return.
There was no shade of ambivalence in the dream, and there was
undoubtedly an element of idealization. It was still very difficult for
Daniel to tolerate the conflict of mixed feelings he experienced
toward me. Nevertheless, the dream helped him to find some "rhyme
and reason" and to put his trust in his internal object. It helped him to
write the essay on knowledge and belief before his subsequent
session. My function in the dream, I think, was to help him to think
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about something painful concerning separation anxiety heightened by

the forthcoming holiday. My role was to help him to think with me
about "where it hurts and why it hurts" and perhaps become more
capable of tolerating psychic pain.
We see something similar in Julie's observation when she asks her
mother to help her reintegrate her feelings of rage and frustration, but
the central element in Daniel's dream concerns the psychic pain
related to loss and separation. As we have seen, Freud wrote in
"Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), if one does not work through the
experience of loss, if there is a failure of this process whether one is
dealing with actual loss or with separation, "the shadow of the object
falls upon the ego" (p. 249). The observation of Faruk and Patrick has
given us a picture of the shadow of this heavy cloud related to
unmourned or unmournable losses.
A holiday of one week was not, in itself, a dramatic separation but
it confronted Daniel with the challenge of thinking about someone
absent and of keeping that person in mind as a good object. So the
dream gives us some hope that introjective processes are beginning to
take place which are likely to help Daniel in this direction. I hope that
our work might help him to internalise what has been described, in the
words of Klein already quoted (see page ), as the basis of the sense of
inner security: 'the introjection of an object who loves and protects the
self and is loved and protected by the self (Klein, 1957).

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