Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession

"Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the First Not-Me Possession" is a paper by Donald Winnicott. He read it to the British Psycho-Analytical Society in May 1951, and it was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1953. It introduced two of his best-known concepts, the transitional object and the good-enough mother. A revised and enlarged version opens his book Playing and Reality (1971). Winnicott starts from a familiar observation. Newborns put their fists and fingers in their mouths, and some months later most infants become attached to one particular object, such as a piece of blanket, a napkin or a soft toy, which their parents learn to respect. He studies what lies between these two stages: between thumb and teddy bear, between oral erotism and a true object relationship, between the infant's primary creativity and its recognition of what comes from outside. The usual account divides the person into two parts, an inner psychic reality and an external world. Winnicott adds a third: an intermediate area of experiencing to which both contribute and whose status is never challenged. Transitional phenomena, such as a babbled sound, a tune or a gesture at bedtime, belong to this area, and so do transitional objects. They usually appear between about four and twelve months. They matter most when the infant is going to sleep and at moments of loneliness, and they serve as a defence against anxiety, especially depressive anxiety. The infant's relationship to the object has particular features: - The infant assumes rights over it. - It is cuddled, but also excitedly loved and mutilated. - It must not change unless the infant changes it. - It must survive love, hate and aggression. - It must seem to have warmth or a life of its own. To an observer the object comes from outside. To the infant it neither comes from outside nor is a hallucination. It stands for the breast or the mother, but the fact that it is not the breast matters as much as the fact that it represents it. It is the infant's first use of a symbol and its first experience of play. It is not an internal object in Melanie Klein's sense but a possession. It keeps its meaning only while the internal object stays alive and good enough, and that in turn depends on the real mother remaining reliable. The theoretical core of the paper is a theory of illusion. At first a "good-enough mother" adapts almost completely to the infant's needs, so that the breast appears where and when the infant is ready to create it. The infant has the illusion of having made it. Her later task is gradual disillusionment: her adaptation lessens as the infant becomes able to tolerate frustration. Disillusionment can succeed only where enough illusion was allowed first. The paradox at the centre of transitional experience is to be accepted, not resolved. No one asks the infant whether it created the object or found it. Normally the object is neither mourned nor forgotten. It gradually loses its meaning as transitional phenomena spread over the whole cultural field. Winnicott argues that the strain of relating inner to outer reality never ends. Relief comes from the intermediate area, which carries the small child's absorbed play into adult life as the arts, religion, imaginative living and creative scientific work. He therefore assigns a positive value to illusion. He also sketches the area's psychopathology: - Addiction is a regression to the stage at which transitional phenomena go unchallenged. - The fetish is the persistence of an infantile transitional object, a point he takes from Wulff. - Lying and stealing are attempts to bridge a break in the continuity of experience. The paper became one of the most influential in post-war psychoanalysis. It laid the ground for Winnicott's later writing on play, on culture, and on what he would come to call potential space.