Digestion, pt. 4

Metabolism--One of the central tasks of the self is to "digest" or "metabolize" the experiences presented to it at each rung of development. "The basic assumption of developmental theory is that experience must become 'metabolized' to form structure." Object relations theorists, such as Guntrip, speak of pathology as "failed metabolism"--the self fails to digest and assimilate significant past experiences, and these remain lodged, like a bit of undigested meat, in the self-system, generating psychological indigestion (pathology). The basic structures of consciousness, in fact, can be conceived as levels of food--physical food, emotional food, mental food, spiritual food. . . . These levels of food, as we will see, are really levels of object relations, and how the self handles these "food-objects" ("self-objects") is a central factor in psychopathology.

--Ken Wilber, Transformations of Consciousness (1986, co-authored by Jack Engler and Daniel Brown)