What do we Mean by “Use of an Object”?

“The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications” (Winnicott, 1968) is not just a paper that has entered the canon as a seminal work, but its title has become a living idea in clinical theory, capturing something important about the movement from the subjective to objective relation to others. The well-known central idea — that the object is destroyed but survives, thus ushering in an objective perception of the world — captures something so important and intuitively true that we still routinely refer to the paper as indispensable to our understanding of how we move beyond the subjective to the objective. Yet, as Ogden (2016) points out, the argument presented in Winnicott's “Use of an Object” paper is far from clear-cut, is hard to follow and sometimes confusing, even while extraordinarily effective in conveying an important insight — so much so that, 55 years later, we return to it again and again.

Ogden (2016) captures the paper's enigmatic power this way:

Winnicott makes use of the reader's experience of reading this paper to show rather than tell the reader what he has in mind, for much of what he has in mind cannot be told or explained, it has to be experienced. (p. 1244, italics in original)

Winnicott, Ogden says, “is showing us what it feels like to use objects” (p. 1246, italics in original). But what is entailed in this shift from a subjective kind of object-relating to the “objectively perceived” way of relating to objects? How does the object “survive” the putative destructiveness that is deployed against it? Is it a matter of a maturational achievement, a newly emergent realistic capacity in the child to perceive accurately (“I imagine destroying you, but seeing that you are still there”)? Is it a new appreciation of dependency on a love of object, as in the depressive position? And is the object actually subject to destruction or to some sort of transformation?

I have always struggled to make sense of this idea that a shift to

objectivity, to a