Toward a Clarification of the Transitional Object and Selfobject Concepts in the Treatment of the Borderline Patient

The transitional object, poised between the realms of inner and outer reality, has become a focus of attention for psychoanalysts of various theoretical persuasions. The British object relations theorists (e.g., Winnicott, 1953) and their contemporary American counterparts, such as Modell (1963), (1968) and Volkan (1973), view the child's separation as a painfully enforced fact of nature, first hated and eventually appreciated and integrated. From this perspective the transitional object is an object ideally suited, and thus valued, to help mitigate painful separation anxiety and the loss of symbiosis. From the perspective of some self psychologists (e.g., Tolpin, 1986), the transitional object has much less to do with the fact of separation. Instead, the transitional object, like other objects (i.e., selfobjects) is seen as aiding in the transformation of native infantile omnipotence into core self-esteem and self-confidence. Separation, they believe, has been overemphasized as both a fact and crime of nature. The self psychologists observe a “different transitional object and a different baby” (Tolpin, 1986, p. 1). Other theorists influenced by self psychology, such as Goldberg (1984), view the transitional object and