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What is an object? In ordinary speech, an object is anything that has material existence in the world. It is usually inorganic and most often man-made. That, of course, is not what psychoanalysts mean by an object. Our use of ‘object’ is based on the grammatical distinction between a subject and an object. The object is what the subject relates to, whether in the accusative, the dative or the ablative form. Almost in defiance of usual associations to the word, the psychoanalyst’s object is human and, to make matters worse, it can also be immaterial. Our internal objects are thoughts, not things.
What does a psychoanalyst call an object? I think the object is something that is cathected by the subject. Originally Freud thought of an object as an object of instinct. I think that more commonly now we see the cathexis as not being purely instinctual. We see the infant as having emotional as well as biological or physical needs, and the object as an object of the infant rather than an object of the infant’s instincts.
I think an object in the psychoanalytic sense is someone, or something, that has an emotional meaning for the person. It is needed or loved, hated or feared. Of necessity, it is an object of perception; you cannot relate to what you do not perceive. So the theme that is proposed to us, ‘What is an object?’, is enormous. It is almost the totality of our emotional experience. I shall therefore confine myself to one aspect of the topic: the role of perception in relation to external objects and to the creation of internal ones.
I shall begin, boldly, by assuming that human beings have inborn mental structures based on biological needs (in humans, this includes psychological needs as well), which become activated at various times of maturation. In my view, these structures are related to phantasies of the self and its basic relation to primary objects. Freud (1911) had assumed inborn phantasies, such as castration phantasies, arising out of our common prehistoric