The Precursors of Transitional Objects and Phenomena1

Those of us who believe that Winnicott has greatly contributed to psychoanalytic theories on the basis of his clinical work—and that clinical work is the most valuable source of material on which to construct theory—were pleased to see him honoured in 1979 at the 31st International Congress of Psychoanalysis in New York, the first to be held in the United States of America.

In introducing the symposium dedicated to him, Dr Phyllis Greenacre, who felt that she had gained very much in the way of clinical content and stimulation from him, referred to his work as a kind of minuet played out between the clinician and the theoretician. The clinical material, she said, is the earthy stuff of our work, and the theories furnish ways to organization, to promote understanding and to further observation. But, if they become too ritualized and are taken for absolute facts, they run the risk of becoming like over-strong defences—they either cramp their subject almost to obliteration, or else they break down and are discarded. The worst fate is rigid over-purification of theory.

As we have learned, early determinants of transitional objects and phenomena are a good-enough mothering (or good-enough holding) and a loss of it which has not been forced too precociously or too abruptly with respect to the ‘stage of concern’. Winnicott wrote:

The infant that is blessed with a mother who survives, a mother who knows a gift gesture when it is made, is now in the position to do something about that hole, the hole in the breast or body, imaginatively made in the original instinctual moment. Here come in the words reparation and restitution, words which mean so much in the right setting … The gift gesture may reach to the hole, if the mother plays her part. (Winnicott , p. 270)

The transitional object and phenomena come close to this reparation, as a way through which the child—now on the way to being a separate person -evokes for himself the union with