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IN 1960 HAROLD SEARLES pointed out the significance of the psychological importance of the nonhuman-environment as follows:
It is even more surprising that psychoanalytic theory has remained largely undeveloped in this important area when we consider the overwhelming abundance of data inherent in man's daily life, in our culture, indicating how essential to his psychological wellbeing is his relatedness to the nonhuman-environment (Searles, 1960, pp. 10–11).
By that time Donald Winnicott (1958) had already made his important contributions on the characteristics of the first beloved possession which he called a transitional object and which is part of that "third part of the life of a human being, a part we cannot ignore … an intermediate area of experiencing to which inner reality and external life contribute" (Winnicott, 1958).