Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Robert Bak commented that the symbolic significance of the fetish corresponds to the pregenital phase and thus may represent breast-skin, buttocks-feces, female-phallus. He questioned the acceptance of the transitional object as a creative act or as a precursor of creativity. Dr. Philip Weissman felt that fetishistic and transitional objects were too sharply delineated and categorized. He suggested that 'transitional alternate' might be substituted for 'transitional object'. Dr. Melitta Sperling noted that what Winnicott described as the transitional object was really the infantile fetish. She also commented that whereas the infantile fetish serves preoedipal needs and represents parts of the mother or the mother in toto, in the adult the fetish invariably represents the mother-phallus. Dr. Judith Kestenberg questioned the use of some of Dr. Greenacre's terms, such as 'good enough mother'. She also asked whether nonhostile aggression referred to oral aggression with the transitional object, and hostile aggression to anal sadism and the fetish.

Dr. Greenacre re-emphasized the intermediate forms between transitional objects and fetishes. She believes in the terms 'good enough mother' and 'not good enough mother'; any mother may be 'not good enough' for her child.