In order to follow along with Psychoanalytic Field’s latest project (which now seems indefinitely delayed), I read D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (1971). As Winnicott states in the first sentence,
This book is a development of my paper ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’ (1951).
Positioned between inner subjective reality and the objective outside world there is an intermediate space in which we play and work, discover and create, interact with others. Winnicott says that this space opens up in infancy, when the child first comes to realize both that his mother isn’t merely an extension of himself and that the temporarily absent mother will return. At first the space between infant and mother is occupied solely by the “transitional object” — the teddy bear, the security blanket, le doudou in French — that for the child represents the absent mother, or more specifically, the mother’s breast. Winnicott summarizes the “special qualities” of the infant’s relationship with the transitional object:
1. The infant assumes rights over the object, and we [i.e., the mother and other adults] agree to this assumption. Nevertheless, some abrogation of omnipotence is a feature from the start.
2. The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated.
3. It must never change, unless changed by the infant.
4. It must survive instinctual loving, and also hating and, if it be a feature, pure aggression.
5. Yet it must seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something to show it has vitality or reality of its own.
6. It comes from without from our point of view, but not so from the point of view of the baby. Neither does it come from within; it is not a hallucination.
7. Its fate is to gradually be allowed to be cathected, so that in the course of years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo. By this I mean that in health the transitional object does not ‘go inside’ nor does the feeling about it necessarily undergo repression. It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It loses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between ‘inner psychic reality’ and ‘the external world as perceived by two persons in common’, that is to say, over the whole cultural field.
In interacting with this object, the child makes the transition from regarding it as something subject to his omnipotent control, to being destroyed or banished, to surviving this destruction and coming into its own existence as a distinct entity. The child’s interaction with the transitional object symbolizes his relationship with the “good enough” mother who , in allowing herself to be engaged by the infant while gradually establishing herself as a separate person, enables the child to move gradually into his own subjective agency. Instead of alternately controlling, being controlled by, and destroying the things and people that occupy the space around him, the child learns how to play with them, to use them, and to create with them.
So now I’m thinking about how Winnicott’s ideas jibe with Lacan’s. For Lacan too the separation of the infant from the mother is a crucial developmental phase. In Lacan, however, this separation seems invariably traumatic. Rather than the mother easing the separation process as in Winnicott’s formulation, for Lacan it’s the father who enforces the infant-mother separation. In Winnicott, the transitional object, on which the child lavishes both its affection and its destructive cruelty, represents the mother’s breast. For Lacan, le petit objet a represents that which the child has lost from itself in being separated from the mother and that which the mother seeks to complete herself; namely, the phallus. For Winnicott the transitional object serves a temporary function in ushering the child into appropriate relationships with real people and objects in his surroundings. For Lacan the object persists forever in sublimated form, either as the external object of desire or as oneself embodying the other’s desire.
If the narcissistic infant perceives the mother, and specifically the mother’s breast, as part of himself, then it’s conceivable that he would regard the transitional object as representing that part of himself which has been cut off, or castrated. Is it conceivable that the (Lacanian) phallus = the (Winnicottian) breast? This equation would work, except for Lacan’s insistence that objet a isn’t what the mother has but that which she desires. The infant perceives that his mother has lost her desire for him because of something he has lost. In Winnicott, the lost object isn’t what the mother desires and searches for, but what the infant desires and has now been detached from him.
There’s a reasonably coherent body of empirical evidence supporting Winnicott’s position: children with secure attachments to their mothers are more comfortable exploring strange situations — what Winnicott might call unfamiliar intermediate territories — than are children with insecure or ambivalent maternal attachments. I don’t know what empirical research has been done on transitional objects.
I’ll probably write a second post about Winnicott’s book, focusing specifically on the intermediate territory between subjective and objective realities.
