Transitional Spaces, Transitional Objects
On Winnicott, 01
Due to some requests, and my own enduring interest in the subject, I’ll be spending some time scouring the papers, theory, and techniques of British psychoanalyst, Donald W. Winnicott (1896–1971) in an effort to extrapolate the interesting and the useful. If Lacan said of Winnicott that he was “the most excellent author … the author to whom we owe one of the most crucial discoveries” (quoted in L. Kirshner, 2011), perhaps we should listen to what the British psychoanalyst said about being human.
Situating the Problematic: From Inner to Outer
In between infantile solipsism and adult nominalism, there exists a space in which the bridge can be built and maintained between the two registers, or modes, of existence. Winnicott used the term ‘transitional phenomena’ to describe this region. He approached the issue of transitional phenomena through primarily a developmental perspective.
In his 1951 paper “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena”, he develops his concept in theoretical and developmental terms. Winnicott believed that psychoanalysis had done a great deal of working fleshing out the subject (its internal world of feelings and experiences and introjects) and objects (the world of other people). What was missing, he felt, was the in-between, the stuff which allowed translation from one to the other.
The infant, for Winnicott, in its pure state, is a nebulous and self-contained subject. There are no boundaries between the infant and its surroundings (and this is especially true of its familial surroundings). This is because, for the infant, all that exists is the infant. And, while Winnicott himself does not use this term, psychoanalysis has called this mode of existence ‘primary narcissism’.
The accuracy of such a term or the empirical evidence of such an existence is not so important for this discussion, however. Winnicott wants us to imagine a hypothetical in which the infant exists unto itself, without any reference to any other thing or person. (This is in the mind of the infant; importantly, this is objectively false from the point of view of the adult.) If this is the case, how does this subjective experience of the infant ‘get to’ or ‘arrive at’ the objective experience of the social world, the world of adults and science and mechanics?
Traditionally, this process was conceived as the product and result of reality testing. But reality testing, as it was thought by psychoanalytic writers, misses out on an essential component of subjective experience: we never fully overcome this frustrating divide between the inner and limitless world of infantile existence and the limited world of others.
So, if this process is never ‘complete’ in the sense that it can be fully accomplished, there must be something structural about this space in between subjective and objective that is constitutive to being a human.
So, first and foremost, what the concept of the transitional object allowed Winnicott to do was to think about the space in-between, the always-incomplete and unsatisfactory relationship between inner and outer.
The Emergence of the Transitional
To understand how the transitional space emerges, we must understand the role of the mother in Winnicott’s theory of development and how the maternal figure structures the experience of illusion-disillusion.
Winnicott believed that, at first, the role of the mother (as always, in psychoanalytic theory, we speak of the ‘mother’ symbolically) is to adapt herself “almost perfectly” (to use his words) to the needs of the infant. As the baby craves food, so the breast appears. And so on.
This installs within the infant a sense of magical power, an omnipotence that allows for a direct relation between inner and outer. For the unperturbed infant, need equals satisfaction — almost perfectly. And this works well and for a long time as the child develops cognitively and physically. Over time, though, the mother will adapt her responses to the child as it develops, offering less satisfaction as the needs grow less intensely tied to her responses.
This process, however, is never perfect. There is never a completely harmonious development of self-and-other; and even if there were, we must account for the space that forms in between these things even as they gradually become separated. The question then becomes: what is the nature of this object that assumes an increasingly important role in the development of the subject?
It is here that we locate Winnicott’s transitional objects and transitional phenomena. The transitional object provides a “relief from this strain” [1]. This is the essential function of the object of transition: it moves the infant into adolescence and adulthood by way of providing clarity and meaning to their otherwise disparate and frustrating development. It allows for the experience of infantile subjectivity, of magic and creation and no limits, to be extended and diffused throughout the subject and her world more broadly.
There are two primary components which are essential to this emergence: (a) “continuity (in time) of the external emotional environment” [i.e., the mother]; (b) “continuity … of particular elements in the physical environment such as transitional object or objects.” [2]
The continuity of environment and object allow the infant to gradually adopt a certain object which facilitates further separation from mother.
The Ontology of the Transitional Object
So the transitional object is neither inside nor outside, neither here nor there. It’s the relation between the two which is embodied in a particular object of the child’s ‘choosing’. A blanket, a toy, and so on.
The important part of this thing is not the objective status of the object — we maybe see here the clumsiness of Winnicott’s vocabulary as not his lack of clarity, but from the confusing place of the object itself — i.e., what we ‘as adults’ see. The important part is the relation it has for the infant. Thus, Winnicott evokes a theory symbolism, the study of representation.
It is true that the piece of blanket (or whatever it is) is symbolical of some part-object, such as the breast. Nevertheless the point of it is not its symbolic value so much as its actuality. Its not being the breast (or the mother) is as important as the fact that it stands for the breast (or mother). [3]
Yes, the blanket ‘stands for’ the breast; but it is also as important to recognize that the blanket — even for the infant — is not the breast. It is something radically new that was nevertheless harvested from something old; a revival, if we can use this term, of a gradually distant object.
As Adam Phillips points out, however, Winnicott is not extending the classical formulations of mourning and nostalgia into this concept of the transitional object. While it can be tempting to do so, there is a crucial difference that sets this idea apart: diffusion. [4] We will get to that below.
The reason why the transitional object occupies such a liminal space — that of non-object representing the original object — is because it is related to the psychodynamics of the internalization of a part-object. Rather than a direct correlation, e.g., a picture of me representing me directly, the quasi-object in question is the representation, the symbolization, of an object which the infant has internalized.
Part-objects, e.g., the breast or the face of the mother, are internalized without much differentiation early on for reasons we discussed above, the infantile’s experience of need equals satisfaction. It is this image or experience or relationship which has been internalized which is then manifested in the transitional object; this way, the child can be quelled without recourse to the actual, physical part- or whole-object.
Diffusion, not Mourning
So why not loss?
The classical Freudian narrative is that of frustration due to loss equals mourning. The object which was once satisfying, the mother, is irretrievably lost to the process of socialization and reality testing. We then go through life mourning this process.
While Winnicott does not attempt to reject this idea, he adds something else to it, describing a different kind of experience. Rather than loss which is then repressed, leading to either symptom or sublimation, the frustration leads to transitional objects which leads to cultural experience. It’s a much more positive take, really. But also with interesting differences.
Winnicott thinks that the transitional object itself is never lost. Herein lies the crucial difference between these two stories. The object is lost, yes; the transitional object is only diffused and dispersed among cultural, aesthetic, and scientific activity.
Because the transitional object facilitates the introduction into the objective, i.e., social world, it contains within it the dynamics of creativity and self-assurance — it contains ‘going on being’ (a favorite phrase of Winnicott). Calling the transitional object the “substance of illusion”, we find its structure already inherent in the great cultural endeavors of human beings because it has within it the implicit claim: “My needs are met in reality” and the creative striving to get there. Why would Hemingway write, for instance, if he wasn’t a little bit narcissistic? If he didn’t think that his internal life could create something new in this world and contribute to culture, he wouldn’t have published his works. The same goes for Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Freud, or Monet.
The Maternal Phallus
By situating the gradual frustration in the agency of the mother, Winnicott takes a distinct step away from Freud (and Lacan) and towards another, very unique, direction. Rather than the father (paternal function) being the thing that separates child from mother, it is the mother herself which performs this action — but gradually, and over time.
So in Winnicott, we see a much smoother, more humane introduction into the symbolic-social world of prohibitions and frustrations and laws. He needs the transitional phenomena to understand how this might happen without the infant being sent into absolute agony. In other words:
Unlike Lacan, who insisted that it was the task of the symbolic father to intercede and to cut the mother-infant dyad so that the infant was not left at the mercy of her maternal jouissance, Winnicott left this symbolic task to the mother and, in so doing, reduced the underlying triadic oedipal task to a binary one. [5]
Winnicott is making two tremendous moves here, which we will explore on their own in later essays: First, he is situating subjectivity where Freud and Lacan would not. Rather than a violent birth into the symbolic world of the Father, Winnicott thinks this emergence is gradual and developmental; and, further, that subjectivity is not born from language, but from maternal distance in combination with the transitional space. Transitionality, for Winnicott, is the constitutive factor of subjectivity.
The second effect of this move will be felt on clinical work. Lacan critiques dyadic psychotherapy time and again throughout his seminars, most notably his first seminar. He taught that the analytic position was neutral, and intervention is only at the level of language. By exposing the fissures and holes in one’s discourse, the analyst can help the analysand’s unconscious desire move more freely, and the analysand can then take responsibility for their desire. Winnicott, by contrast, is forced into a warmer environment. He warned many times that interpretation is used primarily to show the limits of the analyst herself, that the primary vehicle of ‘the cure’ was in the consistent and warm environment wherein the analysand can return to his early relationships and rebuild and refind what was once there, what was lost in the transitional.
References
[1] D. W. Winnicott (1951). Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena. In Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (Ed. M. Khan), p. 240.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., p. 233.
[4] A. Phillips (1988). Winnicott.
[5] L. Kirshner. (2011). Between Winnicott and Lacan: A Clinical Engagement, p. 122.
