By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator
Several years ago, my best friend wrote a book on the topic of narcissism. Then she wrote two more. I have had the honor of reading each one and writing reviews of her work. Public interest in narcissism was still growing when she began writing, so the subject was relatively new to me when I read her first book. Once I understood the basics, I began to see the nuances. Curiosity kept me reading, and life gave me reasons to keep learning. Eventually, I wanted to share what I had learned because it might help someone else understand what they were seeing. That is what this five-part series, How Narcissism Works, will be.
An introject is the version of another person that lives in the mind. In pathological narcissism, that version can become more important than the actual person.
Years after his mother dies, a man sees a green coat draped over the back of a restaurant chair and thinks, She would have hated that color. He can almost hear her say it. Her judgments live on though the woman herself is gone.
We all do this. A grown woman receives a promotion and hears her father warning her against getting too excited. Important people remain present in our minds even when they are somewhere else.
Object-relations theorists call this internal version of another person an internal object. The word object simply refers to the person toward whom a feeling is directed. Introjection is the process through which our experience of another person enters our internal world. The representation that forms there is an introject.
The vocabulary may feel strange at first, but the experience is familiar. An introject allows a relationship to continue across an absence. It helps a young child hold on to the experience of a loving parent who has left the room. Years later, it allows the adult child to imagine what that parent would say during an important moment.
Introjects are part of ordinary emotional life. The important question is how closely the person in the mind remains connected to the person in the world. As the living person supplies new information, a healthy introject changes. Rigidity develops when the internal version gradually acquires greater authority.
Why we carry people with us
An introject contains more than memory. You may remember the afternoon your father taught you to drive, but the father inside your mind also includes the way you expect him to respond when you make a mistake. Your own emotional experience becomes part of the representation.
This helps explain why two siblings can grow up with different internal versions of the same parent. An older daughter may remember a father who made the world feel manageable. Her younger brother may associate the same man with approval that always seemed one achievement away. Both introjects contain something real about the father as well as each child’s experience of him.
The word introject sometimes refers to an internalized voice. A person who grew up with constant criticism may hear You always ruin things long after the original speaker has left the room. The sentence eventually feels as though it comes from within. The parent’s voice has become part of the child’s inner life.
Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein placed internal objects near the center of emotional development. In Kleinian theory, the presence of a stable and loving internal object helps the self become more integrated. These internal figures grow out of relationships and continue to shape emotional life (Bott Spillius et al., 2011; Klein, 1946).
They are shaped by perception as much as experience. Contemporary psychodynamic theory describes internal objects as versions of relationships formed within the mind (Polnay et al., 2023). The child takes in what happened and gives it meaning. The resulting introject carries both.
Every introject therefore contains some degree of alteration. Psychological health depends partly on the mind’s willingness to revise it. A friend who responds generously after years of seeming distant may slowly become more trustworthy in the internal world. The process can take time, but reality continues to influence the picture.
What changes in pathological narcissism
Because introjects are part of every human relationship, the narcissistic use of them begins in familiar territory. The difficulty develops when the version in the mind acquires more authority than the person standing in front of us.
Pathological narcissism changes the balance between the introject and the external person. Here, narcissism refers to a personality organization built around grandiosity and unstable self-worth. Clinical research describes an intense need for recognition accompanied by difficulty regulating that need (Roche et al., 2013; Weinberg & Ronningstam, 2022).
Other people can become important sources of identity or emotional stability. Their independence creates a problem because each person has an inner life of her own. Her choices can change, and she may see the narcissistic person differently than he sees himself.
Sam Vaknin, a writer and lecturer on narcissism, calls this conversion of a living person into a fixed internal image snapshotting. In his model, the narcissistic person takes a psychological picture of a prospective partner and internalizes it. He begins relating to the resulting image. Idealization then improves the picture in much the same way that Photoshop improves a photograph (Vaknin, 2023).
In Vaknin’s model, an introject offers greater control. The internal figure remains available and behaves according to the needs of the person who created it. Its role can stay fixed while the external person grows in another direction.
The comparison is easy to understand. A photograph captures a person at one moment and from one angle. Life continues outside the frame as the subject develops new thoughts or makes choices that fall beyond the earlier image.
Psychodynamic theory uses object constancy to describe the ability to maintain a stable emotional connection with another person during an absence or a period of frustration (Akhtar, 1994). Vaknin uses introject constancy to describe the narcissistic person’s reliance on the internal version instead. In his account, a sense of danger surrounding external people draws the narcissistic person toward a predictable introject he controls (Vaknin, 2022).
This helps explain why an internal representation may remain powerful even after the relationship has ended. Departure removes the actual partner while leaving her introject in place inside the narcissistic person’s internal world (Vaknin, 2022).
How the snapshot takes over
Imagine that Daniel meets Lena at a friend’s dinner party. Lena listens closely while he describes a difficult year and makes an observation that leaves him feeling deeply understood. By the end of the evening, Daniel has begun to form an internal version of her around that experience. She becomes the woman who understands him in a way other people have failed to do.
Daniel calls the next morning. During the following weeks, he tells Lena that she has a rare emotional intelligence. He wants to spend as much time with her as possible and speaks with certainty about the importance of their connection. His attention makes Lena feel that he has recognized something essential in her.
Lena’s response makes sense. Most people would be moved by someone who listened with such care and seemed so certain of their value.
Daniel has seen something real because Lena listened carefully and understood him. He gives those qualities a size and function far beyond what one evening could support. The feeling may be completely sincere, while his internal version of Lena has already begun to exceed the available evidence.
This is where idealization begins. Daniel’s needs help complete the picture. The internal Lena offers relief from loneliness and confirms his belief that his inner life deserves extraordinary recognition. Her role in his mind becomes larger than the woman he has begun to know.
Daniel has identified the qualities that support the role he needs Lena to play. His concentrated attention makes the early intensity feel like unusually deep intimacy. Once that role becomes established, new information about Lena carries less weight.
Suppose Lena later asks for a quiet weekend by herself. Daniel experiences her request as distance. The Lena in his mind wants continuous closeness and finds him endlessly compelling. A need for solitude conflicts with the snapshot.
Daniel may decide that Lena has changed or wants to punish him, and he may tell her, I know who you really are. The sentence reveals how much authority the introject has acquired. He believes his internal version expresses Lena’s true identity, so her own explanation begins to sound false.
Lena reminds him that she has always needed time alone after a demanding week and refers to earlier conversations in which she said exactly that. Daniel hears her through the internal figure, whose needs now organize his interpretation. Her account of herself carries less weight than his conviction about her.
This experience can become deeply confusing. Lena remembers how closely Daniel watched her and how quickly he seemed to understand. She may assume that a better explanation will restore the connection. Yet she is trying to compete with a version of herself created to serve a purpose inside Daniel.
Her hope makes sense, too. She remembers how it felt to be understood and believes she can find her way back to it.
When explanation stops working
The introject serves a psychological purpose for Daniel. It helps him feel understood and protects a particular view of himself. Revising it would affect the emotional structure that has formed around it. A small disagreement can therefore produce a response that seems far greater than the event itself.
Ordinary events take on enormous significance. Changing dinner plans may feel like a collapse of devotion, while a request for privacy carries the emotional force of abandonment. Daniel responds to the meaning the event has inside his mind, while Lena continues talking about the event that actually occurred.
Vaknin’s snapshot model also helps explain the pressure that may follow idealization. The external partner is encouraged to resemble the introject. Praise rewards the qualities that fit the picture, while anger appears when she moves outside it. Over time, the person may begin editing herself in an effort to recover the warmth of the early relationship (Vaknin, 2023).
Much of this process occurs outside conscious planning. Daniel may genuinely believe Lena became colder because he experiences the idealized introject as the original. His first certainty feels like knowledge, which makes her independence look like deterioration.
Arguments become difficult to resolve because facts about Lena’s intention now compete with an internal figure that keeps Daniel emotionally stable. More explanation can create more frustration as he tries to return her to the role she occupied before. Lena feels increasingly unknown by a man who once seemed fascinated by her.
Allowing a person to remain real
Introjects give us the ability to carry love across distance and to keep some part of a person with us after death. A stable internal figure can soothe a frightened child and later influence the adult’s conscience. These internal relationships form part of ordinary emotional life.
Trouble develops when the internal figure becomes rigid. Idealization may make the role feel flattering at first. The person is described as unusually intelligent or uniquely compassionate. She may hear that she feels like home. Eventually, the praise begins to define what she is allowed to be.
The living person reaches the limits of that role when she expresses an unexpected opinion or directs her attention elsewhere. Her separateness places pressure on the introject. The narcissistic person may then try to preserve the internal figure by correcting its human source.
Revision requires the ability to tolerate complexity. Warmth can remain real during a period of frustration. One painful misunderstanding can take its proper place within years of knowing someone. Klein described emotional development partly as a movement toward whole-object relating, in which the loved and hated aspects of another person can belong to one integrated figure. A mind organized around splitting finds that integration threatening (Bott Spillius et al., 2011; Klein, 1946).
For the man in the restaurant, his mother’s opinion belongs to memory and leaves the stranger free to wear green. He understands the difference between the woman who once lived and the version of her he carries. That distinction allows the introject to remain a source of connection.
Knowing another person requires the kind of curiosity that allows her to keep telling us who she is. Trouble begins when someone relies on the internal version and expects the living person to conform to it. She is then trying to be known by someone who has already decided whom he sees.
Daniel and Lena are fictional. Their genders were chosen for ease of narration; these dynamics can occur across genders and relationship types.
Sources and Further Reading
Akhtar, S. (1994). Object constancy and adult psychopathology. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75(3), 441–455.
Bott Spillius, E., Milton, J., Garvey, P., Couve, C., & Steiner, D. (2011). The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. Routledge.
Day, N. J. S., Townsend, M. L., & Grenyer, B. F. S. (2020). Living with pathological narcissism: A qualitative study. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 7, Article 19. doi: 10.1186/s40479-020-00132-8.
Kernberg, O. F. (1976). Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis. Jason Aronson.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
Polnay, A., Pugh, R., Barker, V., Bell, D., Beveridge, A., Burley, A., Lumsden, A., Mizen, C. S., & Wilson, L. (2023). Cambridge Guide to Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. Cambridge University Press.
Roche, M. J., Pincus, A. L., Conroy, D. E., Hyde, A. L., & Ram, N. (2013). Pathological narcissism and interpersonal behavior in daily life. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 4(4), 315–323. doi: 10.1037/a0030798.
Vaknin, S. (2022). Why narcissist can’t get you out of his mind? (Introject constancy). Video lecture.
Vaknin, S. (2023). Snapshotting’s role in narcissist’s shared fantasy. Video lecture.
Weinberg, I., & Ronningstam, E. (2022). Narcissistic personality disorder: Progress in understanding and treatment. Focus, 20(4), 368–377. doi: 10.1176/appi.focus.20220052.
Jill Szoo Wilson 
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