Things: Developmental, Psychopathological, and Technical Aspects of Inanimate Objects

I dedicate this paper to my mother's gramophone.

While the primary caretakers of a growing child have the greatest impact on the formation of his or her personality structure, the inanimate surround within which these interactions unfold is also extremely important. A growing infant has to distinguish itself from not only primary objects, but also its non-human environment. As development proceeds, we see the gradual consolidation of reality-constancy, the use of transitional objects, the deployment of various props to buttress self-esteem during the Oedipal phase, the attempted mastery of external reality through board games in latency, the proud emblems of autonomy during adolescence, the material acquisitions that go with the assumption of adulthood, and the beginning renunciation of material goods during late middle and old age.

In psychopathological states, symptoms involving the inanimate world include a regressive loss of humanness during psychosis, delusions of control by machines and computers, dehumanization of others in moments of rage and cruelty, autistic objects, fetishes, linking objects of the pathological mourner, physical targets of obsessional hauntings, phobic objects, pathological collections, neurotic and perverse dress peculiarities, the paraphernalia of addictions and sexual perversions, and the narcissist's and hysteric's use of physical objects for self-adornment.

A deep regard for the inanimate world must characterize clinical work with

children and psychotic patients. In the psychotherapy and psychoanalysis of non-psychotic individuals as well, attention must be paid to the psychic impact of one's office, the issue of gift exchange between the two parties, the deliberate use of physical objects to evoke memory and affect in the treatment of pathological grief, and the occasional non-human experience within the transference-counter-transference axis.