Concept
Use of an object
Winnicott's distinction between relating to an object, which can stay within the subject's omnipotent control, and using it, which requires that the object be placed outside that control and recognised as real. The step is made when the subject destroys the object in fantasy and the object survives without retaliating; its survival is what makes it external and so usable.
Development
1969
introduced by Donald Winnicott
First presented in New York in 1968 and published in 1969, it was revised as a chapter of Playing and Reality.
In Playing and Reality (1971)
1990
reworked by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin read Winnicott's destruction and survival of the object as the moment the other is recognised as a subject outside one's control, recasting a concept about object use as a step in mutual recognition.
In An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition (1990);Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (1995)
Relations
- 1969 introduced by Donald Winnicott
First presented in New York in 1968 and published in 1969, it was revised as a chapter of Playing and Reality.
- 1990 reworked by Jessica Benjamin
Benjamin read Winnicott's destruction and survival of the object as the moment the other is recognised as a subject outside one's control, recasting a concept about object use as a step in mutual recognition.
Works
- 1971
Playing and Reality (1971), published shortly after Donald Winnicott's death, gathers and extends his late thinking on the area of experience that lies between inner psychic reality and the shared external world. It opens with a revised version of his 1951 paper on transitional objects and transitional phenomena: the blanket, toy or tune an infant adopts as its first 'not-me' possession, which belongs neither wholly to the inner world nor wholly to the outer one. Winnicott insists that the paradox be respected: no one should ask the child whether the object was found or created. The capacity to use such an object depends on a good-enough mother who first lets the infant feel it creates what it needs, sustaining an illusion of omnipotence, and then gradually disillusions it. As the transitional object loses its meaning, the intermediate area it opened spreads over the whole field of play, art, religion and culture. The central chapters treat playing as a universal activity, the basis of health and the medium of psychotherapy, which in this view takes place where the playing of patient and therapist overlap; where a patient cannot play, the first task is to make playing possible. Only in playing, Winnicott argues, can a person be creative and use the whole personality, and only in being creative can the self be found. He contrasts creative apperception, which makes life feel worth living, with a compliance that leaves a sense of futility, and contrasts dreaming, which links to life, with a dissociated fantasying that leads nowhere. He distinguishes a female element, tied to being, from a male element, tied to doing, in people of either sex. In 'The Use of an Object' he separates relating to an object, still under the subject's omnipotent control, from using it, which becomes possible only after the subject destroys it in fantasy and it survives, and is thus placed in a world of shared reality. Further chapters locate cultural experience in the potential space between baby and mother, describe the mother's face as the first mirror in which the infant sees itself, and discuss adolescence as a period whose immaturity should be met rather than cured.
- 1990
An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition
Jessica Benjamin's 1990 paper in Psychoanalytic Psychology argues that the psychoanalytic theory of the self needs an intersubjective dimension alongside the intrapsychic one. On her account development follows two complementary lines: the internalisation of object relations, and a separate trajectory along which the child gradually becomes able to recognise the other person as a subject in their own right, with the attunement and tolerance of difference this requires. Looking at differentiation in the first two years of life, she rereads Mahler's rapprochement phase as a struggle for recognition whose outcome is not only object constancy but the beginning of the capacity to recognise another's subjectivity, and she takes up Winnicott's account of the use of an object: the other's survival of destruction is what allows them to be found as real and outside. Recognition is thus a tension between asserting oneself and acknowledging the other, which can break down into domination; and differentiation is not simple separation but a continual breakdown and repair of mutuality, a view that leaves room for fantasy and aggression in a relational theory of the self. The paper was reprinted as "Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity".
- 1995
Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference
Jessica Benjamin's second book, published by Yale University Press in 1995, gathers six essays that develop a psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity and bring it to bear on gender and sexual difference. Its guiding question is what changes when another person is recognised not merely as an object of one's own mind but as a subject in their own right; because recognition concerns how difference is met, it leads to the question of how the sexes are alike and different, which Benjamin answers with what she calls gender heterodoxy. She presents intersubjective theory as a complement to the intrapsychic, individual-centred tradition rather than a replacement for it, and the book keeps to this "both/and" stance throughout, holding together relational and Freudian views, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and clinical and theoretical material. The opening essay, "Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity", reads Winnicott's account of the destruction and survival of the object as the way the other comes to be recognised as a separate subject. The essays that follow propose an "overinclusive" view of gender, examine the fantasy of the omnipotent mother, describe the daughter's identificatory love for the father, and turn to the erotics of the transference and to sexuality and aggression in pornography.
See also
People
References
- Playing and Reality1971Evidence for a relation
- An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition1990Evidence for a relation
- Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference1995Evidence for a relation