D.W. Winnicott: “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena”

Abstract

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Winnicott’s groundbreaking “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” First read to the British Psycho-Analytical Society on 30 May 1951, the essay was published in International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1953, republished in Winnicott’s Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers in 1958, and then, in revised form, introduced his classic Playing and Reality, published in 1971. Reflecting on Winnicott’s discussion of transitional phenomena in The Language of Winnicott, Jan Abram identifies its significance as follows: “Before 1951, when Winnicott presented his seminar paper, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,’ there was no accounting for the space between inside and outside in the psychoanalytic literature.”

Part of the work of this chapter is to explore that claim, and its significance to the field of “psychosocial studies” – a field deeply embroiled with the problem of how to relate the “inside” and the “outside.” I’ll begin in Winnicott’s essay, and its attention to what he describes as the “perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated.” It’s a task that troubles, or recurs in, Winnicott’s writing. The “inner world,” as he puts it, “can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war” – a description that casts the inner, or internal, world in terms that immediately invoke some of the most resistant aspects of social and political life: war, poverty, violence, and inequality.

A close reading of “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena” can be used to situate the essay anew. Notoriously, Melanie Klein refused to accept Winnicott’s essay as a contribution to her 70th birthday Festschrift – a refusal that can be used to reflect on the often fraught dialogue between the Kleinians and the “Middle Group” or the British Independent Tradition. In the context of a reflection on psychosocial studies, that difficulty is suggestive: this chapter belongs to a complex history that is already an example of the “psychosocial”: that is, it is caught up in the psychic, social, and political life of an institution. This is a starting point for thinking about its more recent contributions to a broadly defined Cultural Studies that has turned to Winnicott as a thinker of the relation between mind, culture, and environment. The concept of the transitional object has been vital to that “turn” – one that has been remarkably generative. There is a strong sense here of Winnicott as a resource, and the transitional object as something like a royal road to cultural experience.