Introject is a popular concept among psychoanalysts and Gestalt therapists, denoting an inauthentic desire: a desire that has no internal roots and is inserted into a person by someone else. The inclusion by an individual in his inner world of the views, motives, and attitudes he perceives from other people.
Example. Parents hammered into the boy’s head that he needed to be a doctor, because this is a family tradition. The boy grabbed the introject “I should become a doctor” and began to implement it. The result is that he suffers, but studies to be a doctor. The way out is to become aware of the introject (for example, in personal therapy) and decide what to do with it. There are two options — either accept or refuse. In the first case, the desire to «become a doctor» will finally become the boy’s personal desire. Secondly, he will stop studying to be a doctor and do what he likes. For example, he will start repairing cars.
In the prevailing terminology, «introject» is something negative that interferes with a person, like a splinter or a stone in his bosom.
In scientific psychology, the concept of «introject» is not used. The point is that what is natural in a person, “not inserted” into a person by someone else, is only unconditioned reflexes and instincts that live in our body at a completely animal level. The natural in a person is what Mowgli have, who have not undergone socialization, who have not joined human culture. But one’s own into the human in a person, his second nature is the culture that we receive from society, that is, from the family, inner circle, friends, school, the Internet … The highest human desires, love for the motherland and the desire to take care of loved ones — in this sense the same introjects, all this has no internal roots in a person and is inserted into a person by someone from outside.
Everything human in a person is an introject. All the best in a person is introjects.
Another thing is that some things were inserted into a person in an ugly, awkward way, not linked to the rest of his motivational sphere, or even in direct conflict with his other desires. In this sense, apparently, it is possible to call introjects the desires of a person that are in conflict with other, basic desires for him.