A general formalism for the scattering of heavy ions, which is especially convenient to study the antisymmetrization effects, is developed. Antisymmetrization effects are investigated by expanding the completely antisymmetrized wave function according to the number of exchanged nucleons. The particle-core model for the scattering of nuclei with loosely bound nucleons is presented. A formula for the additional contribution to the effective potential due to antisymmetrization effects is obtained by calculating the expectation value of the Hamiltonian with intrinsic wave functions. Application of the formalism is illustrated for the $^{14}\mathrm{N}$ + $^{14}\mathrm{N}$ scattering problem and its usefulness is demonstrated.