Idealization occupies a pivotal and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a developmental necessity, a defensive operation, and a pathological formation. Klein locates its origins in the paranoid-schizoid position, where the infant’s innate longing for an ‘extremely good breast’ generates idealized internal objects that serve as a bulwark against persecutory anxiety — the greater the persecutory anxiety, the stronger the imperative to idealize. Yet this same mechanism is deeply entangled with envy: the idealizing impulse, when driven by excessive envy, remains precarious, for envy inevitably reaches toward what it has elevated. For Horney, idealization operates at a higher level of psychic organization, producing not merely an idealized object but an idealized self — an image so compelling it displaces the real self altogether, becoming the fulcrum of neurotic character structure. Wiener observes idealization operating interpersonally between analysts themselves, noting that the mutual idealization between Freud and Jung functioned as a collective scotoma, foreclosing the reflective distance necessary to analyze their own transference dynamics. In somatic and trauma-informed approaches, idealization surfaces as a transference posture — a childlike orientation of looking ‘up’ at the therapist — legible in the body before it is articulable in speech. Across these positions the central tension is consistent: idealization is both a condition of psychic life and, under pressure, its most seductive distortion.
A corollary of persecutory anxiety is idealization, for the greater the persecutory anxiety the stronger the need to idealize. The idealized mother thus becomes a help against the persecutory one.
Klein argues that idealization is structurally bound to persecutory anxiety as its necessary counterpart, functioning defensively to protect the ego from internal and external persecutors.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis
idealization derives from the innate feeling that an extremely good breast exists, a feeling which leads to the longing for a good object and for the capacity to love it… Since the need for a good object is universal, the distinction between an idealized and a good object cannot be considered as absolute.
Klein grounds idealization in a constitutional longing for the good object, locating it at the intersection of the life instinct and envy, while warning that it remains precarious when excessive envy contaminates its object.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis
the individual may come to identify himself with his idealized, integrated image… the idealized image becomes an idealized self. And this idealized self becomes more real to him than his real self, not primarily because it is more appealing but because it answers all his stringent needs.
Horney describes idealization as escalating from an idealized object-image to an idealized self that systematically displaces and alienates the real self, forming the nucleus of neurotic character.
, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950thesis
the mutual idealization that existed between Freud and Jung at this time may have blinded both of them for a while to the process of reflection necessary to understand the transference dynamics. Not long after this incident, this idealization inevitably turned into disappointment and disenchantment.
Wiener uses the historical Freud-Jung relationship as a clinical illustration of how mutual idealization forecloses analytic reflection and predictably collapses into disenchantment.
, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009thesis
The wish for rescue, for instance, may manifest in a childlike somatic organization: head to one side, orienting downward in a helpless posture, or looking ‘up’ at the therapist with idealization.
Ogden identifies idealization as a somatic transference posture that is bodily legible before it reaches verbal articulation, linking it to rescue fantasies and regressive physical organization.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting
Idealization of others… Envious… Unworthy and unlovable… Needy
Flores situates idealization of others as a characteristic feature of the shame-prone, masochistic configuration in narcissistic disorder, pairing it diagnostically with envy and felt unworthiness.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting
not merely mounting, as he must and should, above every fixed and limited reality to absolute possibility: which is to idealize, but even transcending possibility itself: which is to fantasize.
Jung, following Schiller, distinguishes idealization as a legitimate movement toward absolute possibility from fantasizing, which transgresses that possibility and loses contact with the real.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
It simplifies the events of the past by stylizing and idealizing them. The feeling it seeks to arouse in its auditor is admiration and amazement for a distant world.
Auerbach situates idealization as a literary-rhetorical operation of the elevated medieval style, producing a simplified and stylized past that elicits admiration rather than mimetic recognition.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
the Greeks, idealizing above everything the masculine body, should have attained in the composition and refinement of the maternal vessel the highest stage of perfection in their vases.
Rank notes the paradox of Greek idealization of the male body finding its formal perfection in the vessel form that symbolically encodes the maternal matrix, linking aesthetic idealization to primal fantasies.
, The Trauma of Birth, 1924aside
idealization, 21, 26–27
A bibliographic index entry confirming that idealization is treated as a distinct and substantive concept within Wiener’s account of Jungian transference and countertransference.
, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009aside