3, 4, 2
In the early 1950’s, Winnicott had identified the transitional (object, phenomenon, and space) as the bridge between the inner (life) and the outer (reality) that the subject must set up and continually cross if it is to pursue its developmental journey and reach its full potential as subject. Twenty years later, Winnicott declared that the clinical focus on psychic reality, as private and inner, and its relation to external reality was eclipsing serious consideration of the experience grounded by the found object. In an attempt to redress the paucity of the psychoanalytic literature’s treatment of this experience and its cultural repercussions, Winnicott decided to republish his seminal paper on transitional objects and phenomena as the first in a collection (Playing and Reality) that would recast transitionality not only as a function that speaks of a particular psychological configuration but as a process that is key in the life of individual and group.
I believe there is more at work in Winnicott’s position from the 1970’s than the simple expansion of a previously elaborated point of view or the redirecting of clinical attention toward a crucial but under-investigated dynamic. And while there is much inconsistency to Winnicott’s position, inconsistency of which, I would imagine, its author was not entirely unaware, there is also much that remains to be mined and reconfigured. The following are some (interrelated) points to consider.
Point One Many of Winnicott’s critics, big and small, have been keen, and perhaps not unjustifiably, to point out that the found object cannot be a bridge between inner and outer unless the subject has already identified and somewhat mapped both sides of the divide, unless, that is, the subject has already acquired some sense of its own reality’s structural and pragmatic demarcations. Put differently, the subject must consolidate for itself a position and a point of view from which it can distinguish between the inside and the outside, the me and the other-than-me before it can even recognise and utilise the object as found. Contra Winnicott and the classic developmental line that first locates the subject’s most primitive experiences in an undifferentiated and omnipotent state, an “oceanic feeling” as Freud was often fond of saying, and then posits frustration as the driving force behind that subject’s subsequent awakenings to reality and its demands, the found object cannot “antidate” (TOTP 236) reality testing.
Point Two Winnicott started out with the insistence that the found object’s richest quality is its ability to open up for the subject a space for the experience of illusion and play, a space that, in a sense, is free from the constraints of both rough concreteness and solipsistic hallucination. Structurally, Winnicott reached a count of 3 here.
In light of this count, the actual object itself will be eventually decathected to the point where it will lose all meaning; the interaction between subject and object is what is most important. The fact of this interaction must undermine the claim that the found object is merely a bridge to object relationship since it is none other than the found object that makes the encounter and interaction possible. Contra Winnicott (again!) the bridge that is the found object is not to future object relations; the bridge is itself an instantiation of that to which it points.
Point Three By the early 70’s, and with the help of one of his patients, Winnicott introduced a distinction between “fantasying, which paralyses action, and real planning [or dreaming], which has to do with looking forward toward action” (”Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living” 33). Doctor and patient came to see that fantasying about an action and dreaming about it belong to two separate orders (DFL 26):
… fantasying was about a certain subject and it was a dead end. It had no poetic value. The corresponding dream, however, had poetry in it, that is to say, layer upon layer of meaning relating to past, present, and future, and to inner and outer, and always fundamentally about [the subject] (DFL 35).
In addition to differences in depth, Winnicott pointed out the two orders’ different qualities in the experience of time; he will note: “[the patient] then made some excursions into imaginative planning of the future which seemed to give a prospect of future happiness that was different from the here-and-now fixity of any satisfaction that there can be in fantasying” (DFL 35).
With depth and deferral, the difference between fantasying and dreaming has less to do with objects and more with relations. This suggests not so much singling out an experience grounded in reality but an experience aware of its interconnectedness with and relatedness to reality. The differentiation between dreaming and fantasying may hence be between experiencing and dissociation (DFL 26-7), with the proviso that the dissociation is never really complete and, within its logic, the experiencing is only a seeming-to-experience (DFL 28-9) and a doing that is there only to fill a gap. The seeming-to-experience interferes not only with a participation in external reality but also with a living internally since dreaming too belongs to living. As for the dissociation, it is telling of stasis and ossification; it lies on the other side of illusion and play.
But, interestingly enough, this would also suggest that the ossification and fantasying are located in a transitional space, a negative transitional space that impoverishes, if not altogether deadens, the inside as much as it does the outside. Another definition of fantasying is that it is a hallucination that does not enjoy the luxury of infantile obliviousness. Twenty years after he had first introduced his tripartite structure, Winnicott will have moved from a count of 3 to a count of 4.
Winnicott will have flushed out his triadic structure and introduced in between hallucination and concreteness a transitional space of activity that is of two possible qualities: fantasying and dreaming.
Point Four While much remains to be said of the psychic and theoretical factors of chronology and topology, of the ways in which they bring about, enfold, and intercept one another, I am mostly interested in the qualities and dynamics of Winnicott’s transitionality, in the experiences and effects the found object allows or inhibits. It seems to me that the distinction between the pre-, during, and post-, the inner and the outer, of the subject’s relationship to the found object, or any other object for that matter, is much less useful than the distinction between the types of relationships that the subject sets up with the various objects it encounters, whether bodily or psychic, internal or external. The paralysis of the “dead end” of which Winnicott speaks applies equally to hallucination and concreteness as it does to fantasying. At the end of the day, the Winnicottian count is a count to 2 (instead of 3 or 4); it is a count that distinguishes between 2 types of relations, as opposed to 2 objects, 2 locations, or 2 uses. 
19 August 2008 at 4:43 pm
I’ve retrieved a copy of Winnicott’s Playing and Reality from the library in order to follow along with your new series. I should read further before posing this question, so instead I’ll just wonder aloud: I wonder how the infant comes to attend to the transitional object in the first place. There are those Harlow monkey studies where infants without mothers seek physical comfort from soft cloth. But then there are language acquisition studies in which, prior to their 1st birthdays, infants acquire joint acquisition; i.e., the ability to attend to objects pointed out by their mothers.
On a related note, I just saw a reference this article demonstrating that magpies recognize their own reflections in a mirror.
20 August 2008 at 8:10 pm
I think the question of how the infant can “attend” to the found object as a “not me” or other-than-me in the first place is absolutely on point. I’m not sure Winnicott could answer it adequately. It is also the question that has fueled so much interest, in some analytic cercles at least, in infant observation and research. I am personnally very suspicious of the relevance that that kind of research has for work with adults. But that’s a totally different, and very messy, can of worms.
In any case, the question you point to highlights the problem with a developmental line that postulates the almost sudden emergence of a new and radically different psychological agency/function. I think that’s why Klein departed from Freud on the emergence of an ego and a super-ego, for instance.
What I’m trying to do here is to take from Winnicott the idea of the found object and make something of it that doesn’t have to rely on a developmental topology/chronology. My hunch is that the other-than-me is not a quality of the object but of the subject’s relationship to that object and that the relationship itself is not necessarily bound by location (inside/outside) or sequence (pre/post).
We’ll see if this works.
2 September 2008 at 10:27 pm
Dr. Field, why is the Parody Center no longer on your blawgroll?
23 September 2008 at 1:07 pm
Not only have I finished reading the Winnicott book, I’ve written two blog posts about it. Given the >1 month delay, however, I suspect that you’ve abandoned the Winnicott project. You may have noticed also that Larval Subjects has either pupated or been eaten by a carnivorous bird. Do these developments betoken the continuing demise of psychoanalysis in North America?