For it to qualify as found, Winnicott highlights three interlocking moments rather than, say, characteristics or qualities in the life of the found object and, one would have to conclude, in that object’s life for the subject that finds it: animation, resilience, and irrelevance (∗). The found object must possess a modicum of vitality evidenced through warmth, movement, and texture for instance (think here of a child’s experience of a teddy bear or a blanket’s satiny border). Second, the found object has to be resilient enough to survive the loving and/or aggressive manipulations of the individual that finds it (teddy bear and blanket must withstand, among other things, the child’s hugging, gripping, tossing, pulling, or dragging), with the proviso that, and herein lies the found object’s third necessary feature, it must be allowed to be gradually decathected. The blanket or the teddy bear, again, “does not ‘go inside’ nor does the feeling about it necessarily undergo repression. It is not forgotten and it is not mourned. It looses 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” (TOTP, 233).
The found object can therefore hardly be confined to the earliest experiences of the subject. On this score, Winnicott is careful to remind us of the fact that “the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is never [or, more accurately, ought never be] challenged” (TOTP, 240). An inanimate object, an animal, an event, a human being, an organisation, an idea, these are some of the categories of objects to be found, time and again, and are indeed found precisely because of their capacity to be, and because of the subject’s need for them to be, something other than mere objects. The experience of experiencing is a bridging and a weaving across inner and outer realities; it takes place in that transitional space in which the subject foregoes the certainties of, and, in the process, disencumbers itself from the ossifying demands of, both hallucination and concreteness.
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(∗) To each of these characteristics corresponds a quality of the subject that allows it to experience the object as animated, resilient, and/or irrelevant. I shall refer to these qualities provisionally as recognition (by this I do not mean that it is but what or who it is, as animation), aggression, and indifference. That the subject may be unaware of such qualities or that it may exercise them without conscious intention or design does not in any way diminish their reality. I shall return to these qualities later.
