It is not easy for the therapist to discern when, in the patient's communicating, an introject has appeared and is holding sway. One learns to become alert to changes in his vocal tone -- to his voice's suddenly shifting to a quality not like his usual one, a quality which sounds somehow artificial or, in some instances, parrotlike. The content of his words may lapse back into monotonous repetition, as if a phonograph needle were stuck in one groove; only seldom is it so simple as to be a matter of his obviously parroting some timeworn axiom, common to our culture, which he has evidently heard, over and over, from a parent until he experiences it as part of him.

One hebephrenic woman often became submerged in what felt to me like a somehow phony experience of pseudo emotion, during which, despite her wracking sobs and streaming cheeks, I felt only a cold annoyance with her. Eventually such incidents became more sporadic, and more sharply demarcated from her day-after-day behavior, and in one particular session, after several minutes of such behavior -- which, as usual, went on without any accompanying words from her -- she asked, eagerly, ``Did you see Granny?'' At first I did not know what she meant; I thought she must be seeing me as some one who had just come from seeing her grandmother, in their distant home city. Then I realized that she had been deliberately showing me, this time, what Granny was like; and when I replied in this spirit, she corroborated my hunch.