Transitional objects and experiences (Winnicott) are necessary to progressive neutralization, compromise formation, secondary autonomy, and increasingly mature forms of object relatedness. Cultural expressions—such as the story, Jack and the Beanstalk, for mastering Oedipal aggression toward the father—are excellent transitional objects, many of them put aside at one stage of development and taken out again temporarily at another. Parents may create pathology by overintrusiveness into the child's life, never leaving him alone to have transitional experiences of his own choosing. The successful analysis of a twenty-six-year-old male suffering from excessive intrusiveness of the mother is described. In the transference the patient experienced, at first in chaotic fashion, all the elements of his relationship to his mother. He used the analyst as a transitional object toward whom he could experience id impulses, have these met and buffered by the stability and predictability of the analyst, and use all of this to master his own impulses.